Behn

Behn, AFRA, novelist and playwright, was born in 1640, at Wye, in Kent, the daughter of one Johnson, a barber. It is doubtful, then, who was the 'father,' lieutenant-governor of Surinam, with whom as a child she sailed for South America. He died on the voyage out, but Afra reached Surinam, and here made the acquaintance of the slave Oroonoko, who afterwards became the subject of one of her novels. Returning to England about 1658, she married Mr Behn, a merchant of Dutch extraction, but was a widow by 1666. Her personal appearance and vivacious freedom of manners pleased the 'Merry Monarch,' and she was sent as a spy to Antwerp, where she succeeded in discovering the intention of the Dutch to sail up the Thames and Medway. The English court, however, took no notice of her information, a slight which caused the fair agent to throw up state politics in disgust. On her return to England, she became intimate with all the profligate wits as well as the more staid scholars and poets of the time, and devoted herself to literature. Her plays and some of her poems are better than her novels, but all alike are disfigured by impurity of tone; and, in point of intellectual ability, none of her works deserves the high praise lavished on them by Dryden, Otway, and Southerne. She died 16th April 1689, and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Her works were reprinted in 6 vols. (1871).