rosewithoutathorn84
Aphra Behn engraving by Mary Beale
1640-1689
In the 1660s, Aphra Behn served as a spy in Belgium for King Charles II, who had just gained the throne of England after the rule of the Cromwells. By 1670 her first play was produced, "The Forced Marriage", the first in a string of successful plays. During the remainder of her life she wrote plays, poems and novels, and is considered one of the first women professional writers in the English language.
Aphra Behn was a successful author at a time when few writers, especially if they were women, could support themselves solely through their writing. For the flourishing London stage she penned numerous plays, and found success as a novelist and poet as well-and through much of her work ran a decidedly feminist strain that challenged society's restrictions upon women of her day. For this she was scorned, and she endured criticism and even arrest at times. Another similarly free-thinking female novelist of a more recent era, Virginia Woolf, declared that "all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn," according to Carol Howard's essay on Behn in the Dictionary of Literary Biography,"… for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."
info from www.answers.com/topic/aphra-behn
image from www.mith2.umd.edu/eada/gateway/behn.php
Aphra Behn engraving by Mary Beale
1640-1689
In the 1660s, Aphra Behn served as a spy in Belgium for King Charles II, who had just gained the throne of England after the rule of the Cromwells. By 1670 her first play was produced, "The Forced Marriage", the first in a string of successful plays. During the remainder of her life she wrote plays, poems and novels, and is considered one of the first women professional writers in the English language.
Aphra Behn was a successful author at a time when few writers, especially if they were women, could support themselves solely through their writing. For the flourishing London stage she penned numerous plays, and found success as a novelist and poet as well-and through much of her work ran a decidedly feminist strain that challenged society's restrictions upon women of her day. For this she was scorned, and she endured criticism and even arrest at times. Another similarly free-thinking female novelist of a more recent era, Virginia Woolf, declared that "all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn," according to Carol Howard's essay on Behn in the Dictionary of Literary Biography,"… for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."
info from www.answers.com/topic/aphra-behn
image from www.mith2.umd.edu/eada/gateway/behn.php