The striking name of the playwright and novelist Aphra Behn, pioneering queen of English literature, remains largely unrecognised outside academia and the theatre. But this summer, almost 400 years after her birth, Behn’s talents are being celebrated, and especially in her home town of Canterbury. Her extraordinary and mysterious career is being marked by a Netflix film, a statue, a revived play and – the cherry on the cake – by the discovery of a rare first edition 1688 copy of her most famous novel, Oroonoko.
Studied in schools and universities, Oroonoko is the story of an enslaved African prince in the Guianas in the colonial era and is the earliest fictional chronicle of these experiences written in English. He is tricked onto a ship that takes him to Suriname, where he leads an abortive uprising and is violently punished. The story is thought to have inspired the abolitionist movement and only a handful of other copies exist, most in the United States. The newly unearthed original, now on display in an exhibition about Behn in Canterbury, is owned by Anna Astin, 81, who, as a teenager in the 1950s, had been allowed to take it home from her father’s Kent antique shop.
“It is the most astonishing thing,” said Elaine Hobby, emeritus professor of 17th-century studies at Loughborough University. “It never crossed my mind that a book like that would just be sitting on someone’s shelf. In Behn’s period many people had investments in the Royal Africa Company, so were involved in slave trading. Her narrator is a young white woman who thinks the trade appalling. But what makes it fascinating is that you can read it as if she just doesn’t understand the way the world works, or you can agree with her.”
Hobby and colleagues received a grant from the Arts and Humanities Research Council to develop Kent’s links with Behn that resulted in an international conference at Kent University and the current exhibition she has co-curated at the Beaney House of Art and Knowledge in Canterbury. “Anna was amazed by the level of excitement when she brought the book along to show us. I am pleased to say she wants to keep it in the country.”
Behn, the first professional female writer in England and a sometime spy for King Charles II, was the daughter of a publican called Johnson in Harbledown. Her first name, that of a Christian martyr, was fairly common in Kent at the time, and she became Behn with her marriage to her German husband, Johan, in 1664.
If the writer’s name is not now better recognised, it is due to Victorian attempts to diminish her achievements and taint her with immorality. As a young widow she came to the notice of Charles II’s court and was sent out to spy in Antwerp under the codename Astrea. She later returned to England, impoverished, and began to write plays under the same pseudonym. At least 18 of her works, including the popular comedy The Rover, were regularly staged in London over half a century. The satirist Alexander Pope referred to her reputation for lewd content when he wrote, “The stage how loosely does Astrea tread, Who fairly puts all characters to bed!”.
She is soon to be portrayed on screen by Fiona Shaw in Romola Garai’s Netflix drama Monstrous Beauty, a costume drama also starring Bella Ramsey and Dominic West. Earlier this summer Behn’s controversial 1671 play The Amorous Prince was revived. It had been regarded as “too radical, too shocking” in its day, according to Natalie Cox, director of the recent Canterbury Players production. Set in Florence, it tells of a libertine asked to test the fidelity of his friend’s wife.
A long-running campaign to erect a statue of Behn in Canterbury High Street is also coming to fruition. Sculptor Christine Charlesworth has created a lifesize bronze of a 17-year-old Aphra for the Canterbury Commemoration Society, captured as she set off for London.
Behn was fittingly memorialised by Virginia Woolf in her essay A Room of One’s Own. “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,” she wrote. Anyone who wants to comply can find the playwright buried in the East Cloister of Westminster Abbey. “Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind but was of practical importance,” Woolf continued.
• Canterbury’s Aphra Behn: Literature’s Best Kept Secret is at the Beaney’s Special Exhibition Gallery until Sunday 18 August 2024. Admission is free
• This article was amended on 21 July 2024. Aphra Behn’s play The Amorous Prince dates from 1671, not 1871 as an earlier version said.
