The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn

Traditionally known as the first professional woman writer in English, Aphra Behn has now emerged as one of the major figures of the Restoration. During the 1670s and 1680s, she provided more plays for the stage than any other author, and greatly influenced the development of the novel with her ground-breaking fiction, especially Love-Letters between a Noble-Man and his Sister, and Oroonoko, the first English novel set in America. Behn’s work straddles the genres: beside drama and fiction, she also excelled in poetry and she made several important translations from French libertine and scientific works. The chapters in this Companion discuss and introduce her writings in all these fields and provide the critical tools with which to judge their aesthetic and historical importance. The book also includes a full bibliography, a detailed chronology, and a description of the known facts of her life. The Companion will be an essential tool for the study of this increasingly important writer and thinker.

DEREK HUGHES is Professor of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. In addition to many articles on Restoration drama and its background, he has published Dryden’s Heroic Plays (1980), English Drama, 1660–1700 (1996), and The Theatre of Aphra Behn (2001). He was the general editor of the six-volume Eighteenth Century Women Playwrights (2001), and has just completed an edition of early modern texts concerning slavery and America, which includes Behn’s and Southerne’s versions of Oroonoko. He is currently writing a book on representations of human sacrifice in literature and opera.

JANET TODD is the Francis Hutcheson Professor of English Literature at the University of Glasgow. She is a pioneer in the study of early women’s writing; her books include Women’s Friendship in Literature (1980), The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and History (1990) and the biographies, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (1996), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Revolutionary Life (2000) and Rebel Daughters: Ireland in Conflict 1798 (2003). She has edited the Dictionary of British and American Women Writers (1985), the complete works of Aphra Behn (1992–6) and, most recently, The Collected letters of Mary Wollstonecraft (2003). She is the general editor of the Cambridge edition of Jane Austen and co-editor of the journal Women’s Writing.

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO
APHRA BEHN

EDITED BY
DEREK HUGHES
University of Aberdeen

JANET TODD
University of Glasgow

PUBLISHED BY THE PRESS SYNDICATE OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
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© Cambridge University Press 2004

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without
the written permission of Cambridge University Press.

First published 2004

Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge

Typeface Sabon 10/13 pt. System LATEX 2_e [TB]

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress cataloguing in publication data
The Cambridge companion to Aphra Behn / edited by Derek Hughes and Janet Todd.
p. cm. – (Cambridge companions to literature)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0 521 82019 7 (hardback) – ISBN 0 521 52720 1 (paperback)
1. Behn, Aphra, 1640–1689 – Criticism and interpretation – Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. Women and literature – England – History – 17th century – Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Hughes, Derek, 1944– II. Todd, Janet M., 1942– III. Series.
PR3317.Z5C36 2004 822′.4 – dc22 2004049740

ISBN 0 521 82019 7 hardback
ISBN 0 521 52720 1 paperback

CONTENTS

CONTRIBUTORS

ROS BALLASTER is Fellow in English Literature at Mansfield College, Oxford University. Her book Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction 1684–1740 was published in 1992. She has published a number of articles on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women’s writing and a book entitled Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in Eighteenth-Century England, is forthcoming in 2004.

HELEN M. BURKE is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University. She has published essays on Restoration and eighteenth-century British literature and drama, and is the author of Riotous Performances: The Struggle for Hegemony in the Irish Theater, 1712–1784 (2003).

LINE COTTEGNIES is Professor of English Literature at the University of Paris 3 – Sorbonne Nouvelle. She is the author of a study of Caroline poetry, L’Éclipse du regard: la poésie anglaise du baroque au classicisme 1625–1660 (1997) and she has been working on various aspects of seventeenth-century literature. She has recently co-edited with Nancy Weitz Authorial Conquests: Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish (2003), and is currrently working on an edition of Shakespeare. She is also editor of an electronic journal specializing in early modern literature, www.etudes-episteme.com.

JOANNA LIPKING is editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Oroonoko and the author of essays treating Oroonoko’s slave-trade and colonial backgrounds that appear in Aphra Behn Studies (1996) and Aphra Behn (1640–1689): Identity, Alterity, Ambiguity (2000). She teaches English at Northwestern University.

ROBERT MARKLEY is Professor of English at the University of Illinois and the editor of The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation. The author of four monographs and sixty articles in Restoration and eighteenth-century studies, cultural studies, and the cultural study of science, his books include Two-Edg’d Weapons: Style and Ideology in the Comedies of Etherege, Wycherley, and Congreve (1988) and Fictions of Eurocentrism: The Far East and the English Imagination, 1500–1730, forthcoming.

JESSICA MUNNS is Professor of English Literature at the University of Denver. She has written widely on Restoration drama, and edits the journal Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research. Her most recent book is Gender, Power, and Privilege in Early Modern Europe (2003), co-edited with Penny Richards; with Susan Iwanisziw she has just completed editing a selection of plays based on Behn’s Oroonoko.

MARY ANN O’DONNELL is Professor of English and Dean of the School of Arts, Manhattan College. The second edition of her Aphra Behn: An Annotated Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Sources is due in 2004.

SUSAN J. OWEN is Reader in English Literature at the University of Sheffield. She has published articles on Behn in Aphra Behn Studies and the new Macmillan Casebook. Her extensive publications on Restoration drama include Restoration Theatre and Crisis (1996) and Perspectives on Restoration Drama (2002). She has edited the Blackwell Companion to Restoration Drama (2001) and A Babel of Bottles: Drink, Drinkers and Drinking Places in Literature (2000).

JACQUELINE PEARSON is Professor of English at the University of Manchester. She is the author of The Prostituted Muse: Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642–1737 (1988), an edition of Susanna Centlivre (Pickering 2001), and articles on Aphra Behn and other seventeenth- and eighteenth-century women writers. Her most recent monograph is Women’s Reading in Britain 1750–1835: a Dangerous Recreation (1999).

LAURA J. ROSENTHAL is Associate Professor of English at the University of Maryland, College Park, and author of Playwrights and Plagiarists in Early Modern England: Gender, Authorship, Literary Property (1996). She is currently completing a manuscript entitled ‘Infamous Commerce: Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century British Literature and Culture’.

SUSAN STAVES’S scholarly interests centre on English literature and history in the Restoration and eighteenth century, particularly on questions of how cultural ideologies are created and represented in various kinds of texts ranging from comedies to judicial opinions. She is the author of Players’ Scepters: Fictions of Authority in the Restoration (1979) and Married Woman’s Separate Property in England, 1660–1833 (1990), and over thirty articles. With John Brewer, she has edited and contributed to Early Modern Conceptions of Property (1995) and with Cynthia Ricciardi she has edited Elizabeth Griffith’s Delicate Distress (1999). Her current book project is a literary history of women’s writing in Britain from 1660 to 1789.

MELINDA S. ZOOK is Associate Professor of History at Purdue University. She is the author of Radical Whigs and Conspiratorial Politics in Late Stuart England (1999) and the co-editor of Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World (2004). She is currently working on a book-manuscript on the political activism of dissenting women in Restoration England.

ABBREVIATIONS

Except where otherwise stated, all citations from texts by Aphra Behn are taken from The Works of Aphra Behn, ed. Janet Todd, 7 vols. (London: Pickering; Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1992–6). In the case of plays, the volume, act, scene, and line are provided parenthetically; for prologues and epilogues, volume and line numbers; and for poetry and prose, the volume and page. Dates of plays provided in brackets within the text refer to the first known performance unless otherwise stated. All dates are given in new style.

CHRONOLOGY

Mary Ann O’Donnell

Note: all dates are given in New Style.