I went into it with low expectations - I've never enjoyed a single book that was published before 'Pride and Prejudice' - so I wasn't surprised to find myself praying for it to end by the eleventh page. I read this book because I was interested to see what Behn - the first known professional female writer - had to offer.

She was, as Edmund Gosse remarked, 'the George Sand of the Restoration,' and she lived the Bohemian life in London in the seventeenth century as George Sand lived it in Paris in the nineteenth. Her success depended upon her ability to write like a man.'. catered habitually to the lowest and most depraved of human inclinations. furiously resented.' She was, as Felix Shelling said, 'a very gifted woman, compelled to write for bread in an age in which literature. for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.' Vita Sackville-West called Behn 'an inhabitant of Grub Street with the best of them. Woolf wrote, 'All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn. In author Virginia Woolf's reckoning, Behn's total career is more important than any particular work it produced. Along with Delarivier Manley and Eliza Haywood, she is sometimes referred to as part of 'The fair triumvirate of wit.' Her writing contributed to the amatory fiction genre of British literature. Chibka, Laura Brown, Charlotte Sussman, and Mary Beth Rose.Ī Chronology of Behn’s life and a Selected Bibliography are included.Īphra Behn was a prolific dramatist of the English Restoration and was one of the first English professional female writers. Current critical interpretations are by William C. 'Criticism' begins with an overview of responses to Behn and Oroonoko, from learned and popular writers of her time to Sir Walter Scott and Virginia Woolf, among others. Illustrations and maps are also included.

Topically arranged-'Montaigne on America', 'The Settling of Surinam', 'Observers of Slavery, 1654–1712', 'After Oroonoko: Noble Africans in Europe', and 'Opinions on Slavery'-these selections create a revealing context for Behn’s unusual story. 'Historical Backgrounds' is an especially rich collection of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century documents about colonizers and slaves in the new world. The editor supplies explanatory annotations and textual notes. This long-awaited Norton Critical Edition of Aphra Behn’s best-known and most influential work makes available the original 1688 text, the only text published in her lifetime. An alternate cover edition can be found here.

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