The Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. I | Page 4

seems
early to have realized her dramatic genius and to have begun a play
drawn from one of the most interesting episodes in Cléopatre, the love
story of the Scythian King Alcamène, scenes which, when they had
'measured three thousand leagues of spacious ocean', were, nearly a
quarter of a century later, to be taken out of her desk and worked up
into a baroque and fanciful yet strangely pleasing tragi-comedy, The
Young King.
In Surinam she witnessed the fortunes and fate of the Royal Slave,
Oroonoko, of whom she writes (with all due allowance for pardonable
exaggeration and purely literary touches), so naturally and feelingly,
that 'one of the Fair Sex' with some acerbity makes it her rather
unnecessary business to clear Aphra from any suspicion of a liaison. It
was Surinam which supplied the cognate material for the vivid comedy,
the broad humour and early colonial life, photographic in its realism, of
The Widow Ranter; or, The History of Bacon in Virginia. Mistakes
there may be, errors and forgetfulness, but there are a thousand touches
which only long residence and keen observation could have so deftly
characterized.
We now approach a brief yet important period in Mrs. Behn's life,
which unless we are content to follow (with an acknowledged
diffidence and due reservations) the old Memoir and scattered tradition,
we find ourselves with no sure means whatsoever of detailing. It seems
probable, however, that about the close of 1663, owing no doubt to the
Restoration and the subsequent changes in affairs, the Amis family

returned to England, settling in London, where Aphra, meeting a
merchant of Dutch extraction named Behn, so fascinated him by her
wit and comeliness that he offered her his hand and fortune. During her
married life she is said to have been in affluence, and even to have
appeared at the gay licentious Court, attracting the notice of and
amusing the King himself by her anecdotes and cleverness of repartee;
but when her husband died, not impossibly of the plague in the year of
mortality, 1665, she found herself helpless, without friends or funds. In
her distress it was to the Court she applied for assistance; and owing to
her cosmopolitan experience and still more to the fact that her name
was Dutch, and that she had been by her husband brought into close
contact with the Dutch, she was selected as a meet political agent to
visit Holland and there be employed in various secret and semi-official
capacities. The circumstance that her position and work could never be
openly recognized nor acknowledged by the English government was
shortly to involve her in manifold difficulties, pecuniary and otherwise,
which eventually led to her perforce abandoning so unstable and
unsatisfactory a commission.
In the old History of the Life and Memoirs of Mrs. Behn (1696; and
with additions 1698, &c.), ushered into the world by Charles Gildon, a
romance full as amorous and sensational as any novel of the day, has
been woven about her sojourn at Antwerp. A 'Spark whom we must
call by the name of Vander Albert of Utrecht' is given to Aphra as a
fervent lover, and from him she obtains political secrets to be used to
the English advantage. He has a rival, an antique yclept Van Bruin, 'a
Hogen Mogen ... Nestorean' admirer, and the intrigue becomes fast and
furious. On one occasion Albert, imagining he is possessing his
mistress, is cheated with a certain Catalina; and again when he has
bribed an ancient duenna to admit him to Aphra's bed, he is surprised
there by a frolicsome gallant. [10] There are even included five letters
from Mrs. Behn and a couple of ridiculous effusions purporting to be
Van Bruin's. It would seem that all this pure fiction, the sweepings of
Aphra's desk, was intended by her to have been worked up into a novel;
both letters and narrative are too good to be the unaided composition of
Gildon himself, but possibly Mrs. Behn in her after life may have
elaborated and told him these erotic episodes to conceal the squalor and

misery of the real facts of her early Dutch mission. It is proved indeed
in aim and circumstance to have been far other.
[Footnote 10: Both these incidents are the common property of Italian
novelle and our own stage. Although not entirely impossible, they
would appear highly suspicious in any connection.]
Her chief business was to establish an intimacy with William Scott, son
of Thomas Scott, the regicide who had been executed 17 October, 1660.
This William, who had been made a fellow of All Souls by the
Parliamentary Visitors of Oxford, and graduated B.C.L. 4 August, 1648,
was quite ready to become a spy in the English service and to report on
the doings of the English exiles