The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I | Page 2

read through the Memoir and from the superabundance
of his knowledge made suggestions of the first importance. The
unsurpassed library of Mr. T. J. Wise, the well-known bibliographer,
was freely at my disposal. In other cases where I have received any

assistance in clearing a difficulty I have made my acknowledgement in
the note itself.

MEMOIR OF MRS. BEHN.
The personal history of Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to earn her
livelihood by authorship, is unusually interesting but very difficult to
unravel and relate. In dealing with her biography writers at different
periods have rushed headlong to extremes, and we now find that the
pendulum has swung to its fullest stretch. On the one hand, we have
prefixed to a collection of the Histories and Novels, published in 1696,
'The Life of Mrs. Behn written by one of the Fair Sex', a frequently
reprinted (and even expanded) compilation crowded with romantic
incidents that savour all too strongly of the Italian novella, with
sentimental epistolography and details which can but be accepted
cautiously and in part. On the other there have recently appeared two
revolutionary essays by Dr. Ernest Bernbaum of Harvard, 'Mrs. Behn's
Oroonoko', first printed in Kittredge Anniversary Papers, 1913; and--
what is even more particularly pertinent-- 'Mrs. Behn's Biography a
Fiction,' Publications of the Modern Language Association of America,
xxviii, 3: both afterwards issued as separate pamphlets, 1913. In these,
the keen critical sense of the writer has apparently been so jarred by the
patent incongruities, the baseless fiction, nay, the very fantasies (such
as the fairy pavilion seen floating upon the Channel), which,
imaginative and invented flotsam that they are, accumulated and were
heaped about the memory of Aphra Behn, that he is apt to regard
almost every record outside those of her residence at Antwerp[1] with a
suspicion which is in many cases surely unwarranted and undue.
Having energetically cleared away the more peccant rubbish, Dr.
Bernbaum became, it appears to us, a little too drastic, and had he then
discriminated rather than swept clean, we were better able wholly to
follow the conclusions at which he arrives. He even says that after
'1671'[2] when 'she began to write for the stage ... such meagre
contemporary notices as we find of her are critical rather than
biographical'. This is a very partial truth; from extant letters,[3] to
which Dr. Bernbaum does not refer, we can gather much of Mrs.

Behn's literary life and circumstances. She was a figure of some note,
and even if we had no other evidence it seems impossible that her
contemporaries should have glibly accepted the fiction of a voyage to
Surinam and a Dutch husband named Behn who had never existed.
[Footnote 1: Kalendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1666-7. --ed. Mrs. M.
A. E. Green (1864).]
[Footnote 2: This is inaccurate. Mrs. Behn's first play, The Forc'd
Marriage, was produced in December, 1670.]
[Footnote 3: e.g. to Waller's daughter-in-law; to Tonson. cf. also the
Warrant of 12 August, 1682; the Pindaric to Burnet, &c.]
Ayfara, or Aphara[4] (Aphra), Amis or Amies, the daughter of John
and Amy Amis or Amies, was baptized together with her brother Peter
in the Parish Church of SS. Gregory and Martin, Wye, 10 July, 1640,
presumably by Ambrose Richmore, curate of Wye at that date.[5] Up to
this time Aphra's maiden name has been stated to be Johnson, and she
is asserted to have been the daughter of a barber, John Johnson. That
the name was not Johnson (an ancient error) is certain from the
baptismal register, wherein, moreover, the 'Quality, Trade, or
Profession' is left blank; that her father was a barber rests upon no other
foundation than a MS. note of Lady Winchilsea.[6] Mr. Gosse, in a
most valuable article (Athenæum, 6 September, 1884), was the first to
correct the statement repeatedly made that Mrs. Behn came from 'the
City of Canterbury in Kent'. He tells how he acquired a folio volume
containing the MS. poems of Anne, Countess of Winchilsea,[7] 'copied
about 1695 under her eye and with innumerable notes and corrections
in her autograph'. In a certain poem entitled The Circuit of Apollo[8]
the following lines occur:--
And standing where sadly he now might descry From the banks of the
Stowre the desolate Wye, He lamented for Behn, o'er that place of her
birth, And said amongst Women there was not on the earth, Her
superior in fancy, in language, or witt, Yet own'd that a little too
loosely she writt.

[Footnote 4: Aphra now appears on Mrs. Behn's gravestone, and is the
accepted form. This is, however, in all probability the third inscription.
The Antiquities of Westminster (1711), quoting the inscription, gives
Aphara. Sometime in the eighteenth century a certain Thomas Waine
restored the inscription and added to the two lines two more:--