At the Sign of Angellica: Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn is a character shrouded in mystery.  Playwright, spy, possible bisexual, she
was the first woman to be buried in Poet's Corner in Westminster Abbey and is certainly
one of the first women to have publicly earned her living as a professional writer.  

The details of Behn's life are a mixture of mystery and conjecture with very little hard fact. 
She was probably born in July 1640 near Canterbury to a barber and a nanny (to the
influential Colepepper family, whose favour Aphra would depend upon as a grown
woman), it is thought she went on a trip to Venezuela in her early twenties and that the
experience would go on to form the basis for her most famous work, Oroonoko.  Did Behn
marry Low Countries merchant Johan Behn upon her return?  Did she take the name for
convenience.  Either way, it didn't do Mr Behn many favours as he is off the scene, dead or
dead to Aphra anyway a couple of years later.  She was probably a Catholic and a staunch
Tory, and by 1666 had endeared herself (most likely through her connections with the
Colepeppers) to Charles II.  He sent her to Antwerp as a political spy, where it is
conjectured her codename was Astrea.  This fits handily with the idea of her marriage to a
Dutchman and thus having language and perhaps other connections on her side.  Aphra is
commonly compared with Mata Hari during her time in Antwerp and there seems to be little
doubt amongst scholars that pillow talk was her chief method of extracting information.  

So it was all most unfortunate when Aphra returned to England (having had to borrow to
do so) and appeared to have disappointed Charles.  He didn't pay the debts she had
accumulated and she ended up in prison.  In 1669, someone paid for her release.  Quite
rightly irked, Aphra turned to writing as her means of support, declaring herself in the
preface to her play Sir Patient's Fancy as 'forced to write for Bread and not ashamed to
owne it'.  

Her plays were a success from the beginning.  Naughty, rude and honest they didn't so
much sparkle as burn with sexual mischief and contemporary wit.  Popular amongst
libertine circles at Court, Aphra attracted a lot of vitriol from other male writers.  This is not
so surprising.  Her work is not of the first literary flight and her bold sexuality and sharp wit
didn't endear her to other male writers squabbling for a share of the market.  I sincerely
doubt she was an easy person - look at her image (sketched here from a portrait).  She
looks fiery to say the very least. 

As time went on, Aphra had her share of flops and turned more and more to poetry and
prose.  She wrote Oronooko, an instant hit with its noble savage protagonist and whilst not
one of the great works of English literature, it was one that early on crystallized anti-
slavery feeling amongst a section of London's intellectual set.  A friend of John Wilmot (the
famous Earl of Rochester), Aphra's poetry on sexual themes is frequently compared to his
in terms of overt sexuality.  There are clear similarities but I would argue Aphra's work is
based more upon a straightforward elaboration on the female role in and enjoyment of
sex, and Rochester's work reflects what often resembled a tortuous compulsion which led
him into desperately squalid sexual situations.  

One of Aphra's most famous poems is named, no messing about, The Disappointment,
and describes the meeting of a maid, Cloris and a shepherd, Lysander in 'a lone thicket
made for love'.  It's all very pastoral and lovely as Cloris resists yet manages to lose her
clothes and gets him in a lather.  Then, at the crucial moment, Lysander fails to wait for
starter's orders and it all goes horribly wrong.  He attempts to rescue the situation, but his
poor chap is having none of it - 'No motion 'twill from motion take.'  Brilliant!  And it gets
worse!  'In vain he toils, in vain commands: ' Even Cloris has a go (all modesty flown by
this point), but to no avail.

Then Cloris her fair hand withdrew,

Finding that god of her desires
Disarmed of all his awful fires,
And cold as flow'rs bathed in the morning dew.
Who can the nymph's confusion guess?
The blood forsook the hinder place,
And strewed with blushes all her face,
Which both disdain and shame exprest:
 And from Lysander's arms she fled,
Leaving him fainting on the gloomy bed. 

Of all the sketchy details of Aphra's life, The Disappointment proves she couldn't give a
damn who knew she was or had been a sexually active and interested woman: 'The
nymph's resentments none but I, Can well imagine or condole:'.  Her identification with her
whore-heroine Angellica Bianca (in her most popular play, The Rover) may have referred
to her writing for money, or what she felt to be a more base statement about her past in
Antwerp: 'I, vainly proud of my personal judgement, hang out the Sign of Angellica'.  (This
line is frequently used out of context - and I'm doing it as well here.  Just so you know.)

During the 1680s, Aphra defined herself more and more as a poet, but she was also
influential in the early development of the novel, producing the popular Love-Letters
between a Nobleman and His Sister (in-Law, she wasn't quite that liberated, on paper at
least).  Later in the decade, her hands became crippled with what was probably severe
rheumatoid arthritis.  She died on the 16th of April 1689 and was buried in Westminster
Abbey, where a stone stands to her memory in Poets' Corner reading, 'Here lies a proof
that wit can never be, Defence enough against mortality'.

Aphra, with her carnal humour and masculine approach to seduction and satisfaction, her
explorations of deep female friendships and above all, her success in a male-dominated
environment is, and has been a heroine for many strong women.  Vita Sackville-West and
Virginia Woolf both treated her as a feminist heroine; Woolf wrote, in A Room of One's
Own, what are perhaps the most famous lines dedicated to Aphra:

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon

the tomb of Aphra Behn,...for it was she who earned
them the right to speak their minds. 

Aphra Behn is my female gay icon not because I think her writing was so great, or
because she is a beacon for the feminist cause - she is my gay icon because she wasn't
afraid of her sexuality, whatever she felt it to be at the moment of writing.  She wasn't
afraid of putting it into the public domain and let's not forget, it was accepted with raucous
approval by a paying public, if not by her peers.  Whatever the truth of Aphra's life:
servant's daughter, traveller, spy, debtor, writer, she was above all a brave, funny, liberated
and probably very sexy woman.  And lest I leave her with you thinking she was completely
one-tracked, here's a line from The Lucky Mistake, a play she wrote the year before she
died:

That perfect Tranquillity of Life, which is nowhere to be

found but in retreat, a faithful Friend and a good Library.