In eight pages this life and literary career of seventeenth century author Aphra Behn are discussed with Oroonoko; or the Royal Slave a primary focus. Ten sources are cited in the bibliography.
Name of Research Paper File: TG15_TGbehn.rtf
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Literary Canon , For - July 2001 -- properly! In seventeenth-century England, one
could probably count the total number of female writers on two hands. However, most of these women were titled aristocrats like Anne Finch, also known as the Countess of
Winchilsea, and Margaret Cavendish, the esteemed Duchess of Newcastle, because they needed something to occupy their leisurely hours (Gilbert and Gubar 87). These women wrote only to amuse their
friends or to secure an even loftier status in their tightly-knit circle of bluebloods (Gilbert and Gubar 87). However, Aphra Behn did not have the privileged lives of Finch
and Cavendish. Her pedigree was a bit more muddled, and remains to this day a bit mysterious. Born in 1640 to parents described by one of Behns biographers
as an impoverished wet nurse and a barber (Fletcher 54). Another biographer claims that Behns lineage was a bit more socially prominent, but her illegitimate birth prompted an adoption
by a friend or relative of considerably more modest means (Howard 663). What is known, however, was that around 1663, Behn traveled with a foster family to Surinam, West
Indies, and lived an adventurous life of slave rebellions and observed Indian tribal rituals which would later appear in her works (Gilbert and Gubar 87). Her time in Surinam
and her extensive writings on Africans have led some to conclude that Aphra Behn was a mulatto who passed herself off as Caucasian to better assimilate into English society (Froide
279), to which she returned in 1664 (Benedict 194). It was then when she married a man known simply as Mr. Behn, a London-based merchant of Dutch extraction who purportedly