Aphra Behn

Behn was a playwright, poet, translator; she was a woman in a world of men, a staunch Royalist, a spy, and a scarlet woman condemned for loose morals. She was also the first woman in England to identify herself as a professional writer. She wrote to the occasion, and she wrote to make money. There has been a consistent tendency to see Aphra Behn as a personal phenomenon, rather than as the author of a series of works that are interesting in their own right. It's important to state at the start that even now we know almost nothing for certain about Behn's life. But as the public appetite for drama decreased in the early 1680s, Behn began to produce prose fiction, poetry and translations. She was the first professional woman writer in English. She also wrote poetry, the bulk of which was collected in Poems upon Several Occasions, with A Voyage to the Island of Love (1684) and Lycidus; or, The Lover in Fashion (1688). Behn’s charm and generosity won her a wide circle of friends, and her relative freedom as a professional writer, as well as the subject matter of her works, made her the object of some scandal.