"... faith, Sir, we are here to Day, and gone to Morrow."
-- Aphra Behn, The Lucky Chance

  The Aphra Behn Page

"All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It is she--shady and amorous as she was--who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you tonight: Earn five hundred a year by your wits."
  -- Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

Aphra Behn, the first professional woman writer in English, lived from 1640 to 1689. After John Dryden, she was the most prolific dramatist of the Restoration, but it is for her pioneering work in prose narrative that she achieved her place in literary history.

The Aphra Behn Page -- Table of Contents

  Chronology of Aphra Behn's life and works
  Primary sources and related links
  Behn and racism
  Women in the Restoration theater
  The beginnings of the female narrative voice
  Oroonoko and narrative authority (German)
  Aphra Behn and the impossibility of female authorship (German)
  Materials from a course on the early English novel (Universtiy of Freiburg 1997):


• Notes on the beginnings of the English novel
• Credibility and Realism in Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (Anne-Kathrin Rochwalsky)

For comments on this page, please contact Ruth Nestvold.

The Aphra Behn Page, winner March 1996 of the Literary Research Award.

Last updated: November 21, 2000
© 1995-2000 by Ruth Nestvold