Aphra Behn: A Secret Life Read online

  ‘Todd has a good ear for tone and a deep understanding…. An astonishingly thorough book’ Emma Donoghue

  ‘A rip-roaring read’ Michèle Roberts, The Sunday Times

  ‘Genuinely original’ Antonia Fraser, The Times

  ‘Janet Todd is one of the foremost feminist literary historians writing in this country. She has devoted her literary career to recovering the lives and works of women writers overlooked and disparaged by generations of male literary scholars’ Lisa Jardine, Independent on Sunday

  ‘Janet Todd guides us with unfailing buoyancy and a wit all her own through the intricacies of Restoration theatre and politics. [Behn’s] epitaph seems to suggest her wit is buried with her. Not at all; it is now wondrously resurrected’ Michael Foot, Evening Standard

  ‘Thorough and stimulating….clear readable prose....a fascinating study of the public face of Behn, of its shifting masks and modes’

  Maureen Duffy, Literary Review

  ‘A major new biography…Todd’s rich biography will be of interest to everyone who cares about the period or about women as writers’

  Jane Spencer, The Times Higher Education Supplement

  ‘Janet Todd, a feminist scholar, has done a great deal of ground-breaking scholarship on women writers of the “long eighteenth century”. The book is certainly accessible for the lay historian—it reads quickly and lightly...Even Todd’s throwaway lines are steeped in learning and observation. Todd has documented so ably the daring attempt of a woman to write, both for her daily bread and for immortal fame’

  Ruth Perry, Women’s Review of Books

  ‘Todd is so scrupulous and educated an observer that one never has any sense of being fobbed off with speculative fiction rather than well adduced fact.... Todd has shown that even determined secrecy and a series of carefully shaped masks offer no protection against posterity. This is as much of Aphra Behn as we are ever likely to know’

  Brian Morton, Scotland on Sunday

  ‘Janet Todd’s brilliant biography of Aphra Behn weaves a story together with precision, verve and confidence. Witty and pugnacious, Todd’s book is as much a window on the public cacophony of the era as it is a portrait of a playwright’ Melanie McGrath, Independent

  Aphra Behn

  A SECRET LIFE

  JANET TODD

  For Maureen Duffy

  Contents

  Preface

  Acknowledgements

  Introduction to the 1996 Edition

  1. Beginnings in Kent

  2. Sir Thomas Colepeper and Lord Strangford

  3. Voyage to Surinam

  4. Colonial Politics: Willoughby and Byam

  5. Surinam: African Slaves and Native Americans

  6. Marriage and the Great Plague

  7. On the King’s Service

  8. To Antwerp

  9. Debts and Disappointment

  10. In and Out of Prison

  11. Theatrical Debut: The Forc’d Marriage

  12. The Amorous Prince and Covent Garden Drolery

  13. The Dutch Lover and Theatrical Conflict

  14. John Hoyle and Abdelazer

  15. Poetry in a Theatrical World

  16. The Rover and Thomaso

  17. Sir Patient Fancy and City Whigs

  18. The Popish Plot and The Feign’d Curtizans

  19. Deaths of the Earl of Rochester and Viscount Stafford

  20. The Second Part of The Rover and The Roundheads

  21. Free-thinking in Politics and Religion

  22. Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister

  23. The Great Frost and Voyage to the Isle of Love

  24. Death of Charles II and Coronation of James II

  25. Farewell to the Theatre: The Luckey Chance and The Emperor of the Moon

  26. Seneca Unmasqued and La Montre

  27. Part III of Love-Letters and Court Poetry

  28. A Discovery of New Worlds and Poems for James II

  29. The Widdow Ranter and Oroonoko

  30. End of Stuart Dynasty and Death of Aphra Behn

  Notes

  Appendix: Chronological List of Behn’s Works

  Bibliography of Works Written before 1800

  Selected Works Published after 1800

  Index

  About the Author & Author’s Previous Works

  Preface

  Aphra Behn: A Secret Life tells the story of one of the most extraordinary writers in English literature. Behn was fortunate in her historical moment: the Restoration, that naughty period following the end of the Puritan republic and re-establishment of monarchy in 1660. It delighted in masks and self-fashioning as many people remade their pasts to fit new allegiances. Aphra Behn was a woman who wore masks. My biography tries to get behind as many as possible.

  She was the first English woman to earn her living solely by her pen. The most prolific dramatist of her time, Behn was also an innovative writer of fiction and a translator of science and French romance. The novelist Virginia Woolf wrote, ‘All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn...For it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.’ Minds and bodies. Behn was a lyrical and erotic poet, expressing a frank sexuality that addressed such subjects as male impotence, female orgasm, bisexuality and the indeterminacies of gender.

  Despite Woolf’s generous assessment, no woman would have such freedom again for many centuries. (And in our frank and feminist era Behn can still astonish with her mocking treatment of sexual and social subjects like amorphous desire, marriage and motherhood.) During the two more respectable or prudish centuries that followed her death in 1689 women were afraid of her toxic image and mostly unwilling to emulate her sexual frankness. In her day, Behn had the reputation of a respected professional writer and also of a ‘punk-poetess’. For a long time after her death, she was allowed only to be the second.

  Beyond her successes on the stage and in fiction, Aphra Behn was a Royalist spy in the Netherlands and South America. She also served as a political propagandist for the courts of Charles II and his unpopular brother James II. Thus her life has to be deeply embedded in the tumultuous seventeenth century, in conflict-ridden England and Continental Europe and in the mismanaged slave colonies of the Americas. Her necessarily furtive activities, along with her prolific literary output of acknowledged and anonymous works, make her a lethal combination of obscurity, secrecy and staginess, an uneasy fit for any biographical narrative, speculative or factual. Aphra Behn is not so much a woman to be unmasked as an unending combination of masks and intrigue, and her work delivers different images and sometimes contradictory views.

  Much is secure about her professional career as dramatist, but there’s a relative paucity of absolute facts about Aphra Behn’s personal life. Coupled both with the sly suggestions she throws out and with her wonderfully inventive method of weaving experience and fancy with historical fact, this circumstance suggests that speculation and intuition are at times appropriate modes for her biographer. People of the Restoration made mirror and distorted mirror images of themselves. Fooling and deceit were art forms. So identifications in her life story are tentative, and the characters in her ‘true’ narratives and poems, relatives, friends and lovers, may be composite—or imaginary. I continue to see with varying degrees of clarity a ‘real’ human being and a protean author of protean works, a mainly independent woman who worked incredibly hard, often struggled with ill health, and was almost always short of money.

  The Secret Life of Aphra Behn was originally published in 1996 following my edition of her complete works. Now, twenty years on, I find that much has been written about this marvellous writer, much that illuminates her rich oeuvre, but that nothing has significantly changed
for me the overall picture of her and her tumultuous times.

  Readers of today are more at home with speculative and experimental modes than they were two decades ago. We live in an age of information glut and the biographer is judged to be something close to a ‘novelist’ as well as an historian, writing and welcoming more fusion than was once acceptable. Lives can be brilliantly conveyed through words patched together from letters and comments, as if the author were writing his own diary, or the subject may be delivered less as a psychological whole than as a figment of the biographer’s informed imagination. Or again the biographer may be almost entirely hidden or upfronted as questor of a strange life. The critic Frank Kermode once wrote, ‘It is not that we are connoisseurs of chaos, but that we are surrounded by it, and equipped for co-existence with it only by our fictive powers.’ If we want to live a while with Aphra Behn in the age of Charles II and Nell Gwyn, we have to use some imagination—and avoid imposing our present-day psychological and political views on a woman very much not of our time.

  I remain convinced that imagination may complement careful scholarship to illuminate an elusive biographical subject and an exotically strange period. My recent experience as an author of an historical novel probably has a bearing on my present attitude to biography. The need to decide what to include from the culture of a necessarily alien past, to provide a context either for the historical subject or for the invented story, brings the novelist close to the life-writer.

  The extra twenty years of critical commentary since I wrote my biography tell me that, as an author, Aphra Behn is secure in the canon of English literature. She is taught in colleges and universities in English-speaking countries. Where Restoration drama is on the syllabus, she is there with the other great playwrights, William Wycherley and William Congreve. As author of some startling and innovative fictions, she enters as an originator or precursor of the modern English novel, along with Daniel Defoe and the trio of early women writers, Margaret Cavendish, Eliza Haywood and Delarivier Manley. Because of its setting in Surinam, her celebrated novella Oroonoko about a princely black slave is favoured in post-colonialist studies. Finally, in women’s studies courses, Behn is hailed as the first thoroughly professional woman writer, concerned with her craft, with details of publication, and with her status in the literary world.

  For all this critical activity, Aphra Behn is still not as high in appreciation and recognition as I believe she deserves to be—and as I expected her to be when I began thinking about her in the heady 1970s, that decade of rediscovery when so many past women writers were allowed out of the shadows. With her craft and experimental techniques, her exciting female perspective on everything from politics to domesticity and sex, I thought her on a level with Jane Austen in literary importance. I still do. And it’s hard to imagine a more striking and adventurous life—even if a good deal of this life is and was intended to be secret!

  Most of the articles and comments on Behn in the last two decades have been scholarly and subtle, some brilliant in their insights. They have responded to the changing fashions of the discipline of English and Cultural Studies. Second Wave Feminist criticism that brought her to greater notice in the 1960s and 1970s has given way to other ‘Waves’ much concerned with the performative and with amorphous and polymorphous desire, while the emphasis in post-colonialist studies, that other growth area within the discipline, is still overwhelmingly concerned with race and ethnicity. Aphra Behn as writer of sexually explicit poems and portrayer of England’s early colonies has much to say in both areas of study.

  Some work especially useful for a biographer has concerned Behn as dramatist and poet. It throws new light on her stagecraft, her shifting and often prominent position in the theatrical marketplace, as well as on her complex interactions with male colleagues and competitors. In her theatrical dedications Behn uses flattery in ways that both amuse and dismay present critics and, in her plays, she portrays rakes and whores with the kind of ambiguity that can be disturbing—as well as funny. Behn was fascinated by rank, by the notion of nobility, its honour and the manifold ways in which it could be dishonoured. She returned to the topic over and over again in her drama, investigating the allure and vulnerabilities of personal and political authority. Recent critics have applauded her lively enthusiasm for sexual games and her irreverence about the masculinity that dominated the age and which she expresses so well in her plays and in her frank and risqué poems. If her treatment of sex astonishes readers less than it did a century ago, Behn can still shock when she handles subjects such as rape and the seductions of power. In many areas of gender relationships, then, her drama, fiction and poetry are still capable of destabilising our own assumptions. So too can her utopian moral and political schemes, where desire and reality coalesce or clash, and where the body is left to subvert the mind.

  However interesting and disturbing so many of her works can appear, overwhelmingly comment has settled on a single one, Oroonoko. This is usually delivered not in its historical or literary context but in terms of modern ideas of race, ethnicity and gender. Sometimes the novella is coupled with Behn’s posthumously produced play, her ‘American’ work, The Widdow Ranter, set in the English colony of Virginia. Both novella and drama excite clashing interpretations.

  For some contemporary readers The Widdow Ranter seems to advocate republican values against a stuffy, hierarchical and anachronistic world order that cannot easily adapt to a changed environment; the play discovers a superior cultural space that expresses America and a non-European future of freedom. For others, the work is staunchly and overtly monarchical, revealing the chaos of democracy that emerges when the ‘people’ are given power and allowed to decide; we may relish the Falstaffian carnival element of the play, but it remains a portrait of misrule in a disordered colony requiring noble English governance to restore order and prosperity.

  Oroonoko provokes even greater interpretative divisions, especially in its depiction of slavery. This is an overwhelming interest of our own age and, inevitably, as with sex and gender, we look through our modern assumptions at a work written before the secure establishment of the dreadful trade of African and American slavery and when slaves included Englishmen caught by the French and Turks, as well as famous classical slaves like Aesop. Some readers find Oroonoko a roundly aristocratic text stressing nobility and rank beyond anything else. Nobility for Behn can be found in anyone regardless of the colour of his or her skin; conversely, the ignoble of whatever ethnicity deserve slavery. Ignoring the hero’s own involvement in the trade in slaves, other readers see an abolitionist work, and they apply to this fiction of fluidity in types and ethnic groups such modern terms as ‘miscegenation’ and ‘imperialism’. When Oroonoko and The Widdow Ranter are brought together, critics are more in agreement: for Behn may appear to combine humanism with an enthusiasm for noble honour, a comic understanding of life with a less characteristic tragic one.

  If Aphra Behn’s depiction of gender and race can be assimilated to our modern ideas or at least celebrated for its difference, her politics when separated from the moral and social results of Restoration government often remain troublesome. Many critics worry over the apparent conflict between her feminist understanding and her staunch Tory Royalist stance. Recent work has looked at her attitude to the various plots of the age, the Popish Plot and the Meal-Tub Plot and her mockery of fake kings like the would-be king Monmouth. The work sheds light on some of the difficulties in interpretation. In her plays and stories readers have found conflicting messages. Some see occasional critiques of the royal brothers Charles II and James II, others simply an exaggerated loyalty against apparent odds and the currents of history. Perhaps, as contemporary readers, we find splits between desire and hierarchy, between women and dominating monarchy, and between hedonism and loyalty where she and her age found no necessary distinctions. Behn lived through a time of immense political upheaval and we may be wrong to look for consistency. The Vicar of Bray is not the only person who ha
d to move with changes in regimes.

  Her literary milieu was quite different from our own. All educated men and many women were familiar with the classics and, although as a woman Behn would have been denied a university education, she reveals herself well aware of the literary culture of her time. Undoubtedly when reading her we miss many allusions that her original readers and auditors would have caught, both from the Greek and Roman authors and from her contemporaries: the dramatists, poets and romance-writers. Aesop’s Fables which Behn rendered into English verse may leach into her narratives where animals may grow characteristics and show unstable identities. The romantic tales that filled the minds of her readers may enter a work like The Fair Jilt far more than we now expect. What we might see as autobiographical like ‘Love-Letters to a Gentleman’ may indeed reveal something of Behn’s life and loves but also represent a pastiche of the fictional letters so popular at the time. And in this case, since they were published after her death by a notoriously unscrupulous publisher, there is always the possibility that they may be forgeries, so useful and lucrative was the name of the notorious and amorous Mrs Behn.

  Claudine Van Hensbergen underlines this possibility when she reiterates the problematic nature of seeing the letters as Behn’s subjective thoughts. After all, they were written in a period fascinated by the Portuguese Letters, supposed to have come from the pen of a despairing nun rather than, as is now thought, a male French diplomat. The Behn letters may be strategic constructions after her death to help make her an amorous bankable heroine, or, of course, Behn may be using a conventional form to express something both literary and experienced, distraught and manufactured. The many connections between the letters and Behn’s secure works can reveal a hard-working ventriloquist or Behn often writing self-referentially.

  Like so many authors of the age, Aphra Behn claimed much of her work was true. It was fact or history. In reality it might well have been all fiction or fact mixed with fiction. This is especially so of the writings based on her presumed periods abroad in Surinam and the Low Countries when she was a young woman in the 1660s. Any new information about this time is welcome indeed. One of my moments of greatest archival excitement in writing the biography in the 1990s was when, following leads from Maureen Duffy and Mary Ann O’Donnell, I found in the Cathedral records of Antwerp the statement of the wedding of the historical original of the protagonists from The Fair Jilt: François Louis Tarquini and Maria Theresia Van Mechelen. Later I opened the roll of dusty and decaying testimonies of the defendants and plaintiffs in the legal cases that followed. I worked with difficulty, having only a Dutch—English dictionary for help. So it is a pleasure to find Dutch and Belgian scholars now fleshing out and modifying this historical background and providing more of the detail of the events on which Aphra Behn may well have drawn. My other exciting moment was also archival, seeing the proof that William Scot, the agent she had come to bring back into the English fold and whom I speculated she had come to assume was in love with her, was in reality a triple agent—at least. Probably further material will emerge as Continental readers and scholars become more interested in the English émigrés of the Restoration—their desperate political and economic expedients—and in Aphra Behn herself. So far nothing much alters the broad outline of what I wrote in the biography. But who knows what may yet be discovered? It was the business of spies to hide themselves.