biography
| name: |
Behn, Aphra
|
| |
née Amis
|
pronunciation:
[ben]
| sex:
| female
|
| lived:
| (1640–89)
|
| biography:
| Writer and adventurer, born in Wye, Kent, SE England, UK. She was brought up in Suriname, where she claimed to have made the acquaintance of the enslaved negro prince Oroonoko, the subject afterwards of one of her novels, in which she anticipated Rousseau's ‘noble savage’. She returned to England in 1663, then became a professional spy for Charles II in Antwerp, sending back political and naval information. Using the pen name Astraea she turned to writing, as perhaps the first professional woman author in England, and wrote many coarse but popular Restoration plays, such as The Rover (1678), and later published Oroonoko (1688). |
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