Archive: Aphra Behn
episodePreviously titled “Archive: Aphra Behn, pioneering playwright and spy.” — renamed by the publisher on Aug 6, 2026
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Who was Aphra Behn and why is she considered the first professional woman writer in English?
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I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, and welcome to the first in a series of archive editions of In Our Time, which I found especially fascinating. I first came across the 17th century dramatist and novelist Aphra Behn when studying drama at Bristol University. Long forgotten, in the 1970s her reputation and works were experiencing a most deserved revival thanks to the powerful injection of feminism in the theatrical and academic worlds. She was quite simply one of the most influential and popular playwrights of the Restoration period in England. This was a joyous response in the arts to the end of the rather dead hand of life under Oliver Cromwell's protectorate and the return of the monarchy in 1660 under Charles II.
Since the 1970s, Ben's place in the world of academia has been secure. Yet in the wider world, she remains relatively unknown, still living in the shadow of playwrights like Congreve and Dryden. This is disappointing, because as Melvin Bragg's guests demonstrate in this episode, Ben was not only a hugely successful dramatist, novelist and poet... She forged a career and gained recognition as the first woman to make her living from writing, a world which, until the Restoration, women had been prevented from inhabiting and exploring. That among her other career paths she indulged in espionage only adds to the biography of this truly remarkable woman. And even though back in the day I actually read and studied Ben, this episode opened my eyes to many of the things I had missed.
I hope it'll do the same for you. Enjoy listening.
Hello, Aphra Behn was a prolific playwright for the restoration stage, a poet, a writer of fiction, and a sometimes spy, and her life spanned one of the most turbulent times in English history. She was born as the Civil War started in 1640, flourished under the restored Stuart monarchy, and stayed loyal to James II after the Glorious Revolution, right up to her death in 1689. and she was the first English woman to make her living from writing. As tastes changed, she was dismissed as too bawdy, but Virginia Woolf wrote, All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Afra Ben, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. With me to discuss Afra Ben are Janet Todd, former president of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge University, Ross Ballester, professor of 18th century literature at Mansfield College, University of Oxford,
and Claire Burditch, Postdoctoral Research Associate in English and Drama at Loughborough University. Jan Todd, how much do we know about AfroVen's early life?
Well, not a lot, but she was clearly humbly born. We think that her father was a barber in Kent. She was born into this tumultuous time, as you've already mentioned, and for the rest of her life she had a horror of civil strife and Puritan rule, the notion of a government that has to control behaviour and morality. Her mother appears to have been a wet nurse in a more elevated family. And I think it's probably through that connection that she gets to know a man called Killigrew, who, when the restoration comes, is both involved in the Secret Service and in the theatre. And of course, Ben comes into history first as a secret agent.
But in terms of her childhood, Germaine Greer said we must be prepared to live with what we do not know about her early years.
That is what we are doing, I think, rather substantially. I hope one day there will be more known.
Is it sure that her father was a barber in Kent? It seems to be more sure that her mother was a wet nurse, doesn't it?
I think the barber bit is pretty secure. It's all circumstantial because she's not born into the kind of family that keeps letters in the attic and that has a big house where they can control and hold their own archives. So it's not surprising that very little is known.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Who was Aphra Behn and why is she considered the first professional woman writer in English?
0:00–7:15
2
what do we know about Aphra Behn’s early life and family background?
7:15–11:52
3
how did Aphra Behn become involved in espionage for Charles II?
11:52–17:20
4
what was the state of the Restoration theatre when Behn began writing for the stage?
17:20–26:04
5
why was The Rover such a commercial success for Behn?
26:04–35:48
6
how did Behn’s fiction, especially Oroonoko, relate to her political loyalties?
35:48–42:56
7
why did Behn’s reputation fall after her death and how has it been revived in modern scholarship?
42:56–49:37
8
what aspects of gender, libertinism and literary style make Aphra Behn relevant today?
49:37–55:10