'All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds,' Virginia Woolf asserted. Aphra Behn (c. 1640-89) was the first Englishwoman to make her living 'by her pen', as we used to say. Now nobody makes her - or his - living by the phallic and virile pen. Linguistic and cultural structures no longer combine in exhibiting the exciting transgression, the impudent androgyny, of the man-woman who picks up her pen to write, for the she-writer, like the he-writer, will feed symbols through the word processor, a brooding matrix-box far more uterine than penile. Aphra Behn was a shady lady who muscled into the men's preserve, and was called a whore for her pains. Woolf's A Room of One's Own fails to make quite clear how truly successful Behn was in her time. She may not have been Judith Shakespeare, but she got play after play on the stage, her poems appeared in diverse publications, and there was a strong demand for her prose fiction.

LRB 22 April 1993 | PDF Download