Aphra Behn was the first commercially successful woman writer in England in the seventeenth century, writing in various genres, including drama, prose, and poetry. Her prose contributed to the development of the novel as genre in English.

Her origins are uncertain. Her father may have been a barber. Or she may have been born into the landed gentry, as her evident education in languages and literatures accords with that class. Or she may have been adopted by John Johnson, a relative of Lord Francis Willoughby (1614-1666).

In the mid 1600s, she traveled to Suriname, West Indies, then under British rule. She was brought there either by a couple named Amis, who may have been her parents, or by Johnson, who was appointed as the island’s deputy governor. By 1658, she had returned to London and married a merchant named Behn who had connections to the court of Charles II. Her husband died in 1665, leaving Behn in precarious financial circumstances. In 1666, during the Dutch Wars, Behn traveled to Antwerp as a spy in service to King Charles II. He apparently did not pay her for her work, and this coupled with the cost of living in Antwerp forced Behn to return to London in poverty in 1667.

That same year, she began her professional career as a writer, starting with plays that achieved increasing financial success. Mainly romantic comedies, her plays involved sexual adventures and marital mishaps and addressed women’s limited opportunities in her society. They include The Amorous Prince: Or, The Curious Husband (1671), Abdelazer: Or, The Moor’s Revenge (1676), The Rover: Or, the Banished Cavaliers, Parts I and II (1677, 1681), The Emperor of the Moon (1687), and The Widow Ranter: Or, The History of Bacon of Virginia (1689).

Her poetry, which she published between 1684 and 1688, often took the woman’s perspective, with women speakers and, like her plays, they addressed women’s desires and appetites. For example, “The Disappointment” (1684) deals with a woman’s disappointment in her male partner’s impotence.

She also wrote epistolary prose, prose romances, and the prose “history” of Oroonoko: Or, The History of the Royal Slave (1688). Like many early novels, this work hybridizes various discourses and forms, including idealism and realism, and the travelogue, romance, and tragedy. Oroonoko, an African prince, is betrayed into captivity and enslavement by his own grandfather. On the island of Surinam (sic), Oroonoko is reunited with his beloved Imoinda. To protect her and their child from captivity, Oroonoko rebels against white plantation owners. He fails and kills Imoinda before his capture and slow execution—which comes in the form of dismemberment. Through Oronooko, Behn powerfully expresses betrayal and tragedy as general to the human condition. Evidence of her success as a woman writer may be measured by the fact that after her death in 1689, she was buried in Westminster Abbey.