This mini, mini series of shedcasts – and I do mean mini – has been a long time in the gestation, and so I am particularly pleased to present them to you for your consideration. It was the Number 2 child’s idea, 4 years ago, to do this – but then Margaret of this parish persuaded me to cover Margaret Cavendish, so I did her extended biography first, and so it is not until now that Aphra fin ally comes on to the stage. Raise the Curtains!
Aphra Behn, as you may or may not know, was a playwright and poet from the Restoration; she was born – probably – in 1640, and died in 1689. She is an extraordinary figure, with the distinction of being the first woman to make a living by writing, entirely from commercial income. She did not have the benefit of a patron. She did not, like Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, have a vast pile of cash and the social status to ride out any criticism about her gender busting – without her writing, she wouldn’t have had two beans to rub together – though I am never quite sure why anyone would go in for bean rubbing. By anyway she wouldn’t have been able to.
She was also, by all accounts, pretty good at writing. Although, it is one of the features of Behn’s chequered historiography that she became more notable for her existence and what it symbolised than being evaluated for the quality of her work, and we’ll come on to that.
There are many reasons why I wanted to find out more about Behn, and write this shedcast about her. It is an opportunity to peek into the extraordinary culture and social politics of the Restoration elite, an explosive cascade of sexual libertarianism, as though a vast body of frustrated exhibitionism had been building up, held behind the damn of the puritan commonwealth. For 30 years or so, it would flood down the valley of English history, until it washed into the sea; Behn was not only carried along on that tide, she was an enthusiastic cheerleader for it, thoroughly immersed in it. It is also a time of furious political conflict, the rage of parties between Whig and Tory, and Behn took up that battle on the stage – and took sides. And not just on the stage, – she took sides by starting out as a royalist spy. She’s also become well known for one particular work, Oronooko, which tells the story of an Enslaved African Prince, so there’s a twist of colonial attitudes and commentary.
But most of all, there’s her position as a woman writer in deeply patriarchal society, so that’s something to explore. On that by the way, and before we dive into the pool of Aphra’s life, I had better start with an apology – it would not be English not to do so. For many people, including the likes of Virginia Woolf, Aphra Behn has great significance in the history of women; and I don’t consider myself particularly knowledgeable in that as a discipline, so forgive me if I make some howlers or missteps – it’s not impossible, though of course I rely on a number of female academics to guide me.
One more important bit of context for her study is that I think I am not being too controversial when I say that Restoration plays are not very popular these days. I have tried reasonably hard to find one of Behn’s plays, and see nothing staged or planned near me, and London is within striking distance, and have found also it pretty impossible see a theatrical production online; there is a bit of that, there are a few people talking some scenes, academic things, but the easiest I found was a TV drama of one on the BeeB starring a very young Helen Mirren. Books like Oronooko in particular are much easier. But theatre production – nope. We can talk about why not maybe later.
But to be clear – however popular or otherwise Restoration theatre is now, Aphra Behn was not obscure in her lifetime. She was very much part of the community of popular writers such as John Dryden and the greatest actor and stage Manager of the time Thomas Betterton; and the beau Monde who went to the theatre, the movers and shakers of English society, they knew her well.
So that seems a decent place to start, with caveats and qualifications all over. So; are you sitting comfortably? Then let us begin, with how history has treated her, her reputation, and why her name is still pretty obscure, I’d argue, even after 50 years or so of a powerful revival.
So, when she died in 1689, Behn was indeed a big name and her death was very much noticed at a time which was full of sound and fury – I mean we are in the middle of the Glorious Revolution here.
Thomas Betterton was probably referring to her, in a play set to Henry Purcell’s music when he wrote
Give me Astrea and I have all
That soft, sweet, that charming fair
Fate cannot hurt whilst I have her
She’s wealth and power and only she
Astrea’s all the world to me [1]
Astrea incidentally, was Aphra’s personal pseudonym. John Dryden, England’s first Poet Laureate, wrote the epilogue to one of her plays, writing
“She who so well cou’d Love’s kind Passion paint,
We piously believe, must be a Saint.”
This HAS to be Dryden with his tongue firmly in his cheek, because both this and Betterton’s quote, give a very misleading impression of Behn. Her plays and poems are full of sex, intrigue, and for want of a better word, snark. But Dryden very obviously rated her while she was alive and working, and regretted her death:
“Yet tho’ her Pen did to the Mark arrive,
‘Twas common Praise, to please you, when alive;
But of no other Woman, you have read,
Except this one, to please you, now she’s dead.”
The only woman to give pleasure when dead, alleges Dryden. Um. Discuss?
The world had lost a popular and talented playwright and poet; but some women felt they’d lost much more. Soon after her death, there appeared ‘An Elegy Upon the Death of Mrs A Behn, the Incomparable Astraea’. The author announced herself as, and I quote, ‘a young lady of quality’. She felt the world had lost a female champion:
“”Let all our Hopes despair and dye,
Our Sex for ever shall neglected lye;
Aspiring Man has now regain’d the Sway,
To them we’ve lost the Dismal Day…”
But as the academic Abigail Williams points out, even at this time of sexual freedom, or sexual freedom for a titchy tiny elite at least, there is a note of criticism
’twas pity that she practis’d what she taught’.
Now that’s interesting. What the author meant by this was that Behn had taken full and enthusiastic part in the general bawdiness, lewdness, celebrated it, rolled in it with joy and abandon, exploited and manipulated its opportunities for her as a writer, so she was two things: a champion of women, and a writer problematically linked to her sexual life, about which society would be sniffy, sniffy and some.
It’s deeply unfair of course; Behn wrote just like the men around her, and wrote at an interesting moment. Her leading biographer, Janet Todd calls this a period which sits between two patriarchal concepts of women; firstly, the biblical view, with women cast as the weaker vessel of sin and sex, and the coming secular view of woman as ruled not by Eve’s sin, but by an over sensitive body which made them intellectually distinct from men. And so as that flood of elite libertarianism washed away,[2] Behn is tarred with the brush of smut; she’s just part of a bunch of libertines, courtiers, actresses and theatre people, who behave in a way the majority of folks never would. Alexander Pope in the 18th century therefore reduced her plays to nothing but cheap sex
The stage how loosely Astrea tread
Who fairly puts all characters to bed!
This was now the theme, as her work slipped from view, hidden by a cloud of disapproval. The situation wasn’t helped by a 1696 biography published by a man called Charles Gildon, called ‘Memoirs on the Life of Mrs Behn. By a Gentlewoman of her Acquaintance’. This is a slightly bizarre work, which creates a story of an exotic adventuress by stitching together bits of truth, part truth and downright invention.
Some of her work resurfaced in the long struggle to abolish the slave Trade and then to abolish slavery outright, because of her story of the Black enslaved Prince, Oronooko. With apologies for the plot spoiler, to be honest it’s quite a stretch to make the book into an abolitionist track, but for the very best of reasons, that stretching and romanticisation did indeed go on, and so at least her name was connected with a good cause, but for the rest of it, the disapproval just grew; a 19th century critic declared that
The disgrace of Aphra Behn is that instead of raising man to woman’s moral standard, she sank women to the level of men’s coarseness
It took the Bloomsbury Group in the 20th century to start reviving positive interest. Vita Sackville-West wrote a short biography which celebrates Behn as a professional female writer, but spends much of the book focussing on the sort of stuff she should have written in Sackville-West’s view. More famously, in her essay A Room of Her Own, Virginia Woolf declared
‘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.’
But again, Woolf wasn’t being wildly enthusiastic about Behn’s actual poetry and plays, just the idea that she provided an opening and example that others could follow. In 1948, a modern full length biography appeared by an anarchist called George Woodcock. Woodcock painted Behn as an abolitionist, and as a revolutionary, a campaigner and advocate for social and moral freedom. I suppose if you squint sideways while the sun is in the south, you might maybe possibly perhaps convince yourself of that, but the truth is that Behn was very much not a revolutionary in most ways; in fact when the politics flared up with the Exclusion crisis of the late 1670s, she was firmly in the Tory camp, right behind custom and traditions, king, church, stability and hierarchy.
In the 1970s she was recast again; now she was a suffering soul, working hard against patriarchal oppression, a defensive figure and victim, hammered by male critics. But others now point out that Behn didn’t see herself that way at all, and certainly didn’t present herself as a victim at the time. But, Yes, she most certainly looked at things from the woman’s perspective. Not sure it’s the best example, but you might compare the poems written by John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester, called the Imperfect Enjoyment; and her own adapted poem on the same subject called The Disappointment. The subject is male impotence. Rochester’s is full of fury about the failure of his body to do its duty. Behn’s is a bit more subtle, and from the woman’s point of view, about embarrassment and frustration; and also irritation that the bloke concerned – blames her! I have no doubt one the professionals I have been reading would choose a better example, but there you go, I hope it gives you a flavour of Aphra’s style; both poems are duly flowery with Restoration excess, but neither leave an awful lot to the imagination.
So yes, she take a woman’s perspective, but she certainly doesn’t see herself as a suffering victim, whatever disadvantages and money problems come her way. She presents herself as self confident, engaged; she writes in the style of the time, the best takes the very best opportunities to make her name known, her work popular, and earn hard cash. Basically, she writes like the men. She acknowledge the conflict between the sexes, but felt everyone, men and women, had a stake and a share in it – and she exploited the culture of the times to the full, as we will see, she plays on her gender and takes what advantage she can from it.
Which brings us to the current day; and in line with what I’ve just said, Janet Todd, the leading exponent of Behn’s art is keen to emphasise her skill as a writer, her ability to riff off the day’s themes and desires, and make the most of it, and as a child of her time, who must be understood in her historical context rather than purely as an artist; that means she takes seriously the idea that Behn worked as a royalist spy, and explores her role in painting whigs as seditious inheritors of the Roundhead tradition.
Ok, so that’s where we are – Aphra Behn to a large degree has regained much of her rightful place. The BBC had a go at updating Kenneth Clark’s magisterial and much loved book and series, Civilisation in 2018, and a brave attempt it was, though I have to say I didn’t like it that much. Maybe I should try again, but not I’m not going to put myself through it. But one thing I do remember is that refreshingly The Rover, was in there, one of Behn’s most popular plays, and Kenneth Clark wouldn’t have given it the rough end of a pineapple, so that’s progress at least.
Now then, let’s get on with events, dear listener, let’s start at the beginning. At which point, unfortunately, I need to start raising caveats again, since it is hard to establish the most basic of basic facts – when, where and to whom was Aphra Behn born. And there is a problem; here is a quote by Abigail Williams, which is reasonably startling:
It’s important to state at the start that even now we know almost nothing for certain about Behn’s life[3]
Hmm, that’s not good then. The problem is that even in her hey day, when she is at her most popular, she doesn’t leave much of a paper trail. She’s never rich, frequently as poor a church mouse, doesn’t have her own place even, there are no diaries, precious little documentary evidence. So it means that people have to look at what they have, and at what she wrote and try and identify what might be really about her. She has a practice in her writing of making herself the narrator; does that means she’s really talking about herself – or is it just a literary device.
A couple of examples of this; I mentioned Charles Gildon’s Memoirs of you. And what is known, is that it’s a combination of verifiable fact, stuff which would be described in film as ‘based on a true story’ and downright moonshine. Trouble is it’s guesswork as to which is which. Another example of that is Oronooko, where Behn appears as the narrator. Sometimes it seems likely that she was actually there; other times, it’s obviously fictitious and other times well… hmm, dunno…maybe? Maybe not?
So with that caveat, let’s start with the where, of whom and when. Maureen Duffy and Janet Todd, develop what is now the most generally accepted story, and identify her with an Eaffrey Johnson, the Daughter of Elizabeth and Bartholomew Johnson. He was a Barber in Canterbury in 1640, who appears solidly in the actual parish records of Harbletown just outside, where she joined her elder sister, Frances. If you go to Canterbury, it’s clear the town council has claimed her, because there’s a statue of her – pretty good one too.
It seems as though Aphra was therefore of relatively lowly birth, and therefore very much an outlier when it comes to play writing; though her father would be appointed Overseer of the Poor, so they are not without some local status. However, Eaffrey might not be her at all; and just to illustrate here problem of using Aphra’s own, fictional work to try and piece together a life, when she appears as a narrator in Oroonoko, she makes herself a gentlewoman. Hmm. And yet a much later reference from Dryden seems to suggest he thought otherwise.
Now I could fill the rest of this episode with the debate about this. But I am not going to, I am going to present Behn as a Maid of Kent, though it does raise a lot of question. I’ll pick three important ones of these. Firstly, how did she get an education, because she has some sort of learning she writes in a good hand, she knows French, Dutch and Latin; but she clearly feels the lack of a classical education and at several points in her writing will make the same point as Bathsua Makin, Margaret Cavendish and others about the injustice of the inequality of the education of boys and girls.
Another is that she will have a very important connection with Thomas Killgrew, who will be one of the principals in the reboot of English theatre in the 1660s. How does that happen? And finally, how does a Barber’s daughter end up in Surinam in 1663 supposedly as a spy?
So Lisa Hilton has an alternative theory to the Eaffrey Johnson one, which has a lot to recommend it, although there’s probably even less evidence. One reference says she was born in the village of Wye, in Kent. But what if we decide that really means Wye in Maryland, maybe her mother, who we know was a wet nurse, fled an unwanted pregnancy to Maryland as an indentured servant to start a new life there – and maybe Behn was born there. And then, the story goes, maybe her Mum found new opportunities in the West Indies, Barbados. This links her with the Killigrew family, which connection Behn will later exploit, and with a character she really likes, George Marten; and she shouldn’t really like him because he’s a screaming republican just like his bro, Henry Marten. And finally this approach gets her over to Surinam, explains her presence there and her knowledge of Dutch.
Well, it’s elegant, and does answer those questions – it’s entirely supposition, I have to say, and so I will stick with the accepted wisdom; but just so you know it’s out there!
So, the first time we have any undisputed documentation about Behn is from 1666, when at the age of 23 she is in the Netherlands. But there are glimpses of her previous life before then which suggests that she spent some time in Surinam before 1666 – and let me therefore introduce you to Aphra Behn, the Royalist spy.
It is thought by most, that in 1663, Behn is living in Surinam, on the north East coast of South America. The area had been inhabited since 3000 BC as far as is known, a variety of peoples, in coastal settlements or nomadic lives spent between the coast and interior. In the 16th century, the Europeans started to arrive, firstly Spanish then Dutch explorers, and then a series of attempts were made to establish colonies. In the 1630s, the English from Barbados and the Caribbean joined in, with multiple attempts that failed, until for a short period it acquired the name of Willoughbyland. Because one Lord Willoughby of Parham decided to set up a colony there in 1650.
Willoughby was a turncoat – who’d fought for parliament and then switched sides in 1647, when Charles Stuart made him Governor of Barbados, and then in 1650 Willoughby tried again to set up colonies in Surinam, arranged in large plantations to cultivate sugar. There were few local indigenous people, so initially the plantations were mainly worked by indentured European labour. But it was brutally hard work growing and producing sugar, and the supply died up.
The planters knew what to do Barbados was already a slave economy, and probably there were some enslaved Africans in Surinam from the start, so they bought more – bought more people, enslaved Africans. The first recorded slave ship arrived in 1664, the Swallow, bringing 130 enslaved people – it would have brought more, but in line with the vicious conditions of the journey, 54 had already lost their lives in the heat and filth of the ship. By that time there were about 5,000 people living in the Surinam colonies as a whole, and the centre of the colony was the town of Toraica up the Surinam River. I say town; it had maybe 100 houses and chapels.[4]
A significant component of the colonists was made up of disgruntled ex parliamentarians, who had fled Barbados. One of them is our George Marten; and another is a man called William Scott. Scott was the fugitive son of the regicide and former spymaster Thomas Scott, who was very much on the radical Republican wing, who had been furious with the arrival of a head of State in the form of the Lord Protector and being replaced as spymaster by Thurloe. On the Restoration, Thomas Scott had been tricked with hopes and fair words into turning himself in to the authorities…and was executed as a regicide in London. So William Scott was on the run. And it might be him that drew Behn to Surinam.
There are multiple theories of how Behn came to Surinam, it’s all fascinating historical detective work. One has it that her Dad was made a governor of Surinam though he died on the way; another assumes the family connection from the Caribbean, still another suggests possibly in the household of a planter. But the one that floats my boat, and has the widest acceptance – is one of skullduggery. A word which originally invites visions of lichen covered skulls for the brutally murdered dug up in some remote, wet forest, but I learn originates in no such thing, it was once a Scots word for bad behaviour, which reached America in the 1850s, who had a much more vivid imagination and re-versioned it to the meaning it really always deserved.
Anyway, I wobble from the story and warble – so, skullduggery. The story goes that Aphra arrived in Surinam at the age of 23 with her Mum and Sister, as a spy, she arrived to spy on William Scott. He was considered a dangerous man, especially in Surinam when he might link up with the other ex parliamentarians short of guntlement, and be inclined to the real skull-making work of rebellion; or maybe to be used as a source of information with his access to other men on the run from the worryingly short arm of the Restoration law.
It’s thought that Aphra was there because of a coded reference in a letter from the Deputy Governor recording the departure of Astrea and Celadon; and it’s reasonably convincingly thought Celadon stood for Scott, who was moving on to The Netherlands, a popular destination for Rebellious English folks. And that Astrea was codename for Behn, since this will be one of her own favourite pseudonyms.
Is there any indication of why she would have become a royalist spy? Obviously there’s a rich history of underhand women fighting for the royals – Jane Whorwood who helped Charles escape, Elizabeth Murray and her network from Ham House, and others, but how would a Barber’s daughter from Kent get into it, and how could she turn up in Surinam, a possibly expensive and dangerous trip?
Well, she would be well known throughout her life and writing for her fierce royalism, so we know where her inclination lies – which does make her friendship and liking for Geroge Marten intriguing; and the first solid documentation we have from Behn in 1664 actually comes her work as a 100% bonefide spy in Antwerp. How she first got into it, and may have earned an all expenses-paid outing to Surinam is very much conjecture and could be tripe. But back home she did have some influential family connections. The Culpepers were an important land owning family in Kent; and Aphra’s mother had been wet nurse to the Culpeper family. That meant her foster brother was one Thomas Culpepper.
Thomas Culpeper knew people – because he was a fiercely loyal royalist, and an active part of the Sealed Knot, the rather ineffective group seeking to kill Cromwell and raise the country in rebellion for Charles Stuart. As, incidentally, was a man called Thomas Kiligrew, who had fled abroad with his king, and he was a close confidente throughout Charles’ troubled, and increasingly desperate years of exile. For which loyalty he would later be rewarded, which will have a direct influence of Behn’s life.
The Culpeper connection is one way in which it’s thought Behn may have acquired an unusually good education, and acquired good handwriting and language skills. It’s also thought that it may have involved her in early spying for the Sealed knot – through there is zero physical evidence of that; it’s suggested that Behn may have been able to act as a courier, taking messages to the Sealed Knot. She would have been part of a company of women who made the most of the lower attention they attracted from the authorities, like Susan Hydem, Clarendon’s sister. Thurloe was kind of aware of them, and wrote reports on merchant’s wives, and particularly Booksellers who ran errands for the Sealed Knot.
So it may be that Culpeper and Killigrew recruited the family to hunt down William Scott, after the Restoration. Maybe even a sort of honey trap thing – befriend and betray him for the cause. And the same letter used to identify Behn’s presence in Surinam suggests she did indeed strike up a friendship with Scott, and maybe also a relationship – the Governor disapproved doubly, because Scott was a known Republican, and because he felt her behaviour was scandalous. We don’t really know, of course – but just as Behn would be known for royalism, so she would be known as a libertarian, who, liked others reacted against the puritan Commonwealth with wild expressions of personal freedom that even made Charles II blush.
If the book Oronooko’s narrator is to be taken as in any way as autobiographical, Behn was very easy with England’s imperial ventures; she represented the colonists’ society as a sort of extension of the home country, full of people she liked and also those she despised – we’ll come to her view on slavery later when we talk about her later publications, but she saw the native American Indians as happy innocents who would inevitably be taught or suppressed if they objected. She seems to have spent time visiting the local indigenous people and exploring the countryside.
She also had time to start writing, and the result was her first play, The Young king, which would not see the light of day on the stage until 1679. It’s a romantic tragi-comedy, full of courtly dialogue, heroic lovers, Arcadian shepherds and drama driven by disguises and revelations. It also seems to have a tinge of criticism of absolute monarchy she’ll not get into later; maybe that’s a result of being in the colonies under a rather arbitrary Governor; or maybe it’s the influence of two locals she spent a deal of time with – William Scott and George Marten.
By mid 1664, Behn was in London, probably pushed by the Governor’s disapproval, and removed; Scott would leave not long after, and they will meet again but when they do, Aphra will be Mrs Behn – a widow. Her husband is even more shadowy than she is; probably he was a German merchant, Johan Behn, possibly involved in the slave trade; and if Janet Todd’s instinct is right, quite probably the marriage was not a success, and her hub appears in Oronooko as a villainous sea captain.
Or possibly it was a meeting of minds and bodies, a passionate affair and whirlwind romance. But two things we do know for sure; one is that Johan had soon swapped the business of trade for the business of pushing up the daisies; and given the timing, quite probably he died in the Great London plague of 1665 to 6. The second thing we know is that if the marriage had been for money – it had not been a good choice, Behn’s money was probably tied up in ships, and when he died Behn was left with very little money. That will also be a theme.
Gildon’s Memoires claim Behn had an audience with the Charles II, a sort of debrief from Surinam; and it may be that she was re-introduced there to Thomas Killigrew, and she took the chance to present him with some of the exotic curiosities she’d brought back from Surinam – namely three feathers, the sort of thing he could use in his theatrical productions. That early evidence of interest in the theatre suggest that she may already not have seen her first play, the Young King, as just an activity for private consumption as was the norm for women, something largely to be read and never put on the stage. And maybe she was already pitching for work to the mover and shaker of the Restoration theatre world; and if so, her husband’s death also had hidden benefits – it’s very, very unlikely the world at that time would have accepted a married professional playwright. So you know – every cloud has it’s silver lining and all that.
She was pitching because Thomas Killigrew had received his reward for his loyalty to Charles II – he had been given one of the two theatre companies re-established with the Restoration – the King’s Theatre. But we are not going to talk about Aphra the playwright yet – we are going first to finish the story of Aphra the Spy. Because Killigrew had an idea – that she should continue her pursuit of William Scott, interrupted by her year or so of marriage.
William Scott had arrived in the Netherlands without a penny to his name, and so he got himself a job – spying for Johan de Witt, the Pensionary General of the Netherlands. The Dutch were very much in English minds at this stage because of the Second Anglo Dutch war – and after all, they would carry out the most audacious and indeed humiliating raid on the Medway in July 1667. So the Earl of Arlington, Charles’ chief minister, was thirsty for information. Killigrew’s plan was to exploit Behn’s relationship with William Scott. To head over to Antwerp, and from there, get back in touch with Scott – and try and turn him. Make him a double agent. In fact the incompetence of Charles’ Sealed Knot seemed to have translated itself to the incompetence of Charles’ government – Scott was genially hated by the Dutch, since he refused to learn the language and was therefore pretty much useless as a source of information. But whatever.
Aphra was sent £50 by Arlington, and a promise of more, and set herself up in Antwerp. She got in touch with Scott, suggesting they meet. Antwerp was the centre of the counter reformation in North West Europe, the part of the Netherlands the Spanish had managed to hold onto through the bloodshed of the Dutch Uprising. Since it was a sort of showcase for the Counter Reformation, they had lathered it with gilt and twiddles, but also glorious art such as Reubens’ Jesuit church of St Ignatius. Aphra would always have a liking for Catholic display and loved it; in her later novel one of her characters would declare
Sure there is nothing gives the idea of real heaven like a church adorned with rare pictures and other ornaments of it which charm the eyes, and music to ravish the ear
But Scott was either timid a nervous mark; or possibly a cynical one, who felt the English government had very little to offer, and he maintained contact with Behn only to see if he could fleece them of a bit of cash. Which he couldn’t; because Behn herself was penniless, and once the initial £50 had run out, her handler refused to help with as did both Arlington and Killigrew, not helped by the lack of any useful information from her – and so her increasingly desperate sounding begging letters went unanswered. Aphra’s letters grew long and involved as she copied out letters she claimed had originated from Scott, and then tried to get the support she needed and had been promised.
There are two views on this. The mainstream one is that Behn had been left high and dry, and was not a great agent, over did her lengthy begging letters which no minister of state would have the patience to plough through; and that she copied out Scott’s letters in her own hand to protect his identity being discovered by an interception. There are others – Nadine Akkerman and Lisa Hilton see it differently. They see Behn’s letters as living proof of an audacious and inventive wordsmith and adventurer; she wrote with detail and verve because she was selling a story without foundation, spinning a line to get financial blood out of the stone of officialdom. She wrote out Scott’s letters not to protect him – but because there were no letters. Scott had always been a blind alley, she made them all up, and needed to clear her debts and run for home.
But Killigrew and Arlington had proper deserted her – so she borrowed £150 from an English merchant in Antwerp, and sailed for England in May 1667. She would probably have picked up the news, incidentally, that Surinam was no longer an English colony – the Dutch had seized it, and under the final peace treaty, it would remain Dutch.
She was probably pretty desperate. London of course was a dystopian wasteland, just starting the reconstruction after the fire which had destroyed 13,000 houses, the vast majority of the City of London, and brought the walls of St Paul’s Cathedral crashing down. Although the temporary camps were gone, there would have been impromptu brick works pumping out smoke, construction gangs everywhere putting up new buildings according to the Committee’s four part template for houses. Rents would have been sky high. Demand led pricing is of course, not a new idea.
Some letters from Behn survive from the period, and they paint a picture of desperation, and she was ruthlessly chased for debt. In her mind would have been the horrors of Debtor’s prison, and you didn’t have to be called Little Dorrit to know all about that. A petition from the time gives a flavour
For many weeks we have fed on dogs, rats and ox liver …and we are allowed 13s 4d a week among a hundred persons
For a woman of course the dangers of physical and sexual violence would have made a debtor’s prison and even worse prospect, so she needed to clear that debt and find a way to make money. Again we are hampered by very little information and by interpretation. She writes a long letter to Killigrew asking for money, and if you read it straight then she was at the end of her tether with snippets like
…tomorrow I must submit myself to prison…I have cried myself dead and could find it in my heart to break through and get to the king and never rise til he were pleased to pay…but I am sick and weak and unfit for this or prison…I will send my mother to the king with a petition…this is my reward for all my great promises and endeavours
Charles Gildon’s memoirs claim she was indeed thrown into the Fleet; but there is no evidence of this in their records. And if you take a view that a master wordsmith like Behn was perfectly capable, once more, of spinning a line, it may well be that this letter was in fact a fine example of debt collecting. There’s pathos there, appeal to the ‘weak and feeble woman’ convention, a bit of moral, you-let-me-down-look-what-I-did-for-you-and-this-is-how-you-repay-me blackmail. Genius, and also a bit of threat. Do you really want my sick old mother hanging around outside the king’s door complained how his government leaves loyal women high and dry?
We do not know what happens until 1670 actually. But it probably didn’t involve debtor’s prison, or at least not for long. She and her mother probably set up in lodging in Whitefriars in London, and Behn earned as she could. She almost certainly did copying work, including legal copying of which she seemed to have knowledge. Janet Todd thinks she may well have needed to find herself a man to keep her, and possibly, on the basis of a poem she wrote, she may have done that in one of the best markets for find such people – the Kentish Spa Town of Tonbridge Wells, small but growing. The Earl of Rochester wrote a long poem about a day he spent there, travelling out from London, and the sort of people who turned up there and I think it’s fair to say he wasn’t impressed
At five this morn, when Phoebus raised his head
From Thetis’ lap, I raised myself from bed,
And mounting steed, I trotted to the waters
The rendezvous of fools, buffoons, and praters,
Cuckolds, whores, citizens, their wives and daughters.
And possibly, also where Aphra found herself a fancy man, if that is indeed what she did. However – she was never going to be content with that, she had ambitions, bigger plans. Her eyes were set on the theatre.
[1] Duffy,M: ‘The Passionate Shepherdess’, p396
[2] Todd, J: ‘Aphra Behn: A Secret Life’, p xxvii
[3] Aphra Behn and the Restoration Theatre by Abigail Williams, Kate O’Connor at http://writersinspire.org/content/aphra-behn-restoration-theatre. Published on 11 July 2012.
[4] Hilton, L: ‘Scandal of the Century’, p63
