Behn’s Literary Career

Abstract

Aphra Behn’s first play to be performed, The Forc’d Marriage, was at the Duke’s Theatre in early 1670. At this point, she was a woman of thirty, with no previous publication history, and from a relatively humble, and certainly obscure, background. How did such a woman emerge and go on to become one of the leading and most prolific playwrights of her generation? That question cannot be answered completely satisfactorily, partly because Behn herself fictionalised and disguised her own past life, and partly because sufficient records do not exist about women of her class to verify suppositions made about her education, background and personal views. This chapter examines what we know about her plays and other literary works, first in the context of the theatrical and literary world in which she moved and wrote, and then briefly in the context of what we do know, and may guess, about her biography. The range and nature of the plays she wrote, which spanned a writing and performance career of nearly twenty years, illuminates the comedies we have analysed and discussed in this book. Her thematic concerns remained remarkably constant, focusing frequently on questions of identity, marriage, female autonomy, and gender and sexuality, within a social, familial and political context.