BehN aphra biography of alberta

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New York: W. W. Norton, 2000.

Works

Oroonoko

Oroonoko is a short novel published in 1688, less than a year before Aphra Behn's death. Now considered her masterpiece, the novel concerns the tragic love of its hero, an enslaved African in Suriname in the 1660s, and the first-person narrator's own experiences in the South American colony.

Living in the Restoration, she wrote at least nineteen plays, some good, some indifferent, but all fast paced and theatrical. To protect Imoinda from punishment following the assassination, Imoinda and Oroonoko agree to a suicide pact. The two lovers are reunited there, under their new Christian names of Caesar and Clemene, even though Imoinda's beauty has attracted the unwanted desires of the English deputy-governor, Byam.

The slaves are hunted down by the military forces and compelled to surrender on Byam's promise of amnesty. Oroonoko's love forbids him from killing his beloved, but he stabs her anyway, and she dies with a smile on her face.

As such, it failed in the end as 'Love Armd' suggests it would, for Behn realized that, although the sexes were intellectually equal, they were far from culturally so. While it is undeniably true that the quality of Behn's prose is less perfected than that of some of her more famous colleagues in the English canon, it is also equally true that her works are more than mere pulp fiction.

For years, however, she continued to work at her material for Oroonoko, drawing from her personal experiences in Suriname. The Second Anglo-Dutch War had broken out between England and The Netherlands in 1665, and Behn was recruited as a political spy to Antwerp by Charles II. Her codename for her exploits is said to have been Astrea, a name under which she subsequently published much of her writings.

Once she had thought her sort of writing of no great importance, but towards the end of her life, she intensely desired immortality for 'her masculine Part the Poet,' as she put it in her defence of the last original play performed in her lifetime, The Luckey Chance (1686). The man, however, is in the centre of the Court; the woman has become a wandering whore.

Although she was fascinated throughout her last years by the perversities and difficulties of female sexuality, Behn's prime subject remained state politics.

Little conclusive information is known about Aphra's marriage, but it did not last for more than a few years. She knew and wrote for Nell Gwyn, John Dryden, the Earl of Rochester and the Duke of York and was both famous and notorious in her time. By 1669, an undisclosed source had paid her debts, and she was released from prison.

Oroonoko is then tricked and captured by an evil English slave captain. At the end of this novel the two aristocratic characters who had started out as illicit lovers are both roving libertines. Information regarding her life, and especially her early life, is scant, but she was almost certainly born in Wye, near Canterbury, on July 10, 1640, to Bartholomew Johnson, a barber, and Elizabeth Denham.

As a detractor noted,

.... Elizabeth Denham was employed as a nurse to the wealthy Culpepper family, who lived locally, which means that it is likely that Aphra grew up with and spent time with the family's children. This article abides by terms of the Creative Commons CC-by-sa 3.0 License (CC-by-sa), which may be used and disseminated with proper attribution.

At the conclusion of the love story, the narrator leaves Suriname for London.