Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 04.djvu/134

Behn took the fancy of the town, was patronised by the Duke of York, and, being supposed to be written by a man, gave rise to great curiosity. She immediately followed it up with the 'Debauchee,' 1677, also anonymous, the worst and least original of her plays, and with the 'Town Fop,' also 1677, in which she makes extraordinary efforts, first, to write as uncleanly as any of her male rivals, and, secondly, to revive the peculiar manner of Ben Jonson, which had quite gone out of fashion. Mrs. Behn never scrupled to borrow, and she took the plot of her next play, 'Sir Patient Fancy,' 1678, from Molière's 'Malade Imaginaire.' She was blamed for this, and for the startling indelicacy of her dialogue, and she tartly responds in an extremely amusing preface to the first edition of this play. Engaged in a great variety of other literary work, she was silent on the stage until 1681, when she brought out a second part of the 'Rover,' with her name attached to the title-page. The next one or two years were years of great prosperity to Aphra Behn. Her comedies produced and printed in 1682, the 'Roundheads' and the 'City Heiress,' were very well received by packed tory audiences; Otway wrote a prologue to the latter; the former was rapturously dedicated to the Duke of Grafton. The 'False Count,' 1682, was her next comedy, Aphra Behn was encouraged in 1683 to publish her mild little first poem, the 'Young King.' After this she appealed to the stage but once more during her life with the 'Lucky Chance,' a comedy, and the 'Emperor of the Moon,' a farce, in 1687; both of these pieces were failures. In 1684 she had collected her 'Poems,' the longest of which is a laborious amorous allegory entitled 'A Voyage to the Isle of Love.' In 1688 she published 'A Discovery of New Worlds,' from the French of Fontenelle, with a curious 'Essay on Translation,' by herself, prefixed to the version. Her laborious life, however, was now approaching its close. In a beautiful copy of elegiac verses which she contributed to a volume of poems in memory of Waller in 1688, she speaks of long indisposition and 'toils of sickness' which have brought her almost as near to the tomb as Waller is. She died, in fact, in consequence of want of skill in her physician, on 16 April 1689, and was buried in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, where her name may still be seen inscribed on a slab of black marble. Her tragi-comedy of the 'Widow Ranter' was brought out in 1690 by 'one G. J., her friend,' and finally in 1696 another of her posthumous plays, the 'Younger Brother,' was published by Gildon, with a short memoir prefixed.

Aphra Behn was a graceful, comely woman, with brown hair and bright eyes, and was painted so in an existing portrait of her by John Ripley. She is said to have introduced milk punch into England. She deserves our sympathy as a warm-hearted, gifted, and industrious woman, who was forced by circumstance and temperament to win her livelihood in a profession where scandalous writing was at that time obligatory. It is impossible, with what we know regarding her life, to defend her manners as correct or her attitude to the world as delicate. But we may be sure that a woman so witty, so active, and so versatile, was not degraded, though she might be lamentably unconventional. She was the George Sand of the Restoration, the 'chère maítre' to such men as Dryden, Otway, and Southerne, who all honoured her with their friendship. Her genius and vivacity were undoubted; her plays are very coarse, but very lively and humorous, while she possessed an indisputable touch of lyric genius. Her prose works are decidedly less meritorious than her dramas and the best of her poems.

Mrs. Behn published a great number of ephemeral pamphlets, besides her once famous novels. Works of hers which have not been hitherto named are: 1. 'The Adventures of the Black Lady,' a novel, 1684. 2. 'La Montre, or the Lover's Watch,' a sketch of a lover's customary way of spending the twenty-four hours, in prose, 1686. 3. 'Lycidus,' a novel, 1688. 4. * The Lucky Mistake,' a novel, 1689. 5. * Poetical Remains,' edited by Charles Gildon, 1698. Aphra Behn published a great number of occasional odes in separate pamphlet form, among which may be mentioned 'A Pindarick on the Death of Charles II,' 1686, and 'A Congratulatory Poem to her most Sacred Majesty [Mary of Modena],' 1688. She joined other eminent hands in publishing a version of 'Ovid's Heroical Epistles' in 1683. Her plays were collected in 1702, her 'Histories and Novels' in 1698, the latter including, besides what have been mentioned above, 'Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave,' which inspired Southerne's well-known tragedy; 'The Fair Jilt,' a story, the scene of which is laid in Antwerp, and recounts experiences in the life of the writer; 'The Nun; 'Agnes de Castro;' and 'The Court of the King of Bantam.' The works of Aphra Behn passed through many editions in the eighteenth century, the eighth appearing in 1735, and one of her plays, 'The Rover,' long continued to hold the stage in a modified form.

[The birthplace of Mrs. Behn is here given for the first time. The writer was led to believe, [The birthplace of Mrs. Behn is here given for the first time. The writer was led to believe, from a note in the handwriting of Lady Winchilsea in a volume which he possesses, that Mrs. Behn was born, not at Canterbury, as has hitherto been stated, but at Wye, in Kent. On application to the vicar of Wye, it appeared that the register contains the baptism of Ayfara, the daughter, and Peter, the son, of John and Amy Johnson, 10 July 1640. Lady Winchilsea states that her father was a barber. The only other authority for her life is that by an anonymous female hand prefixed to the first collected edition of her novels. For other information reference has been made to original editions of her writings, which are now unusually rare. Some particulars about her were preserved in the manuscript notes of Oldys the antiquary.] 