1689 Aphra Behn currently holds the title of Britain’s first novelist – although there remain chauvinists who would back Daniel Defoe. But had she never written a word of fiction, Behn would still have ranked as one of the most remarkable women of her century.
‘Eaffrey’ Johnson was born in 1640 near Canterbury. What scant evidence there is suggests that her father was a ‘barber’. Among other things, these intimate attenders to the male person were first ports of call for those with venereal problems. In return for services rendered, the Johnsons received favours from powerful local families. It was thus, one assumes, that Eaffrey’s father, the barber, was appointed in 1663/4 Lieutenant General of Surinam, a British colonial possession. The Civil War had (temporarily) disturbed the usual power, patronage and privilege circuits. And Surinam was hardly a plum posting – even for a governor with a royal commission in one hand and a shaving bowl in the other.
The colony was located where Guyana now is, between the Orinoco and Amazon rivers (a stream, as Behn charmingly notes, ‘almost as large as the Thames’). It was not far from where Robinson Crusoe is shipwrecked at exactly the same period of time that Miss Eaffrey was there – if indeed she was. Slaves from Africa worked the plantations. These ‘black cattle’ were notoriously ill-treated. It was a black man’s hell, and a white man’s grave.
Thus it proved for Aphra’s father, who evidently died there. Did his daughter accompany him to Surinam? The question vexes readers of Behn’s primal novel Oroonoko. It seems, from the ostentatious accuracy of her local description and the introduction of actual historical figures, that she indeed knew the place first-hand. Sceptics argue that she was no more there than Defoe was eye-witness to the Plague Year.
It seems (again, the details are hazy) that in her mid-twenties Aphra Johnson married a trader – possibly in slaves – called Hans Behn. He was Dutch or German and apparently died (in the plague?) or absconded, shortly after their marriage. Aphra may even have invented him to render herself a ‘respectable’ widow.
Whether or not the shady European spouse existed, Mrs Behn (as she hereafter inscribed herself) knew Europe at first hand. In 1666 war broke out between England and Holland. Now in her late twenties, Aphra (codename ‘Aphora’) served as a spy, for the newly returned Charles II, in Antwerp. The ‘she spy’ did good work. Legend, apocryphal alas, has it she warned her country of the Dutch navy’s incursion up the Thames in 1667. But Aphora did not profit from her service to the nation: 1668 found her in debtor’s prison. From 17th-century 007 to Moll Flanders.
She came in from the cold with her first play, The Forced Marriage, in 1670. Actresses (‘Mrs Bracegirdle’, et al.) had broken the old ‘boys only’ convention – so why not go a step higher and write the things? Particularly if you could do it as wittily – and king-pleasingly – as Mrs Behn. One of her comedies, The Feign’d Courtezans, is dedicated to Nell Gwynn. Behn would market more profitable fare than oranges to her monarch and his retinue.
Late in what would be a short life, Aphra Behn turned to fiction, of which Oroonoko, published in 1688, is judged her masterpiece. The London theatre, with the monarchy again in bloody dispute, was in recession. And Behn, it is known, was hard up: and, in her forties, ‘friends’ may have been harder to come by.
In the ‘True Story’ as the title proclaims itself (the term ‘novel’ was yet to be invented), an African prince, Oroonoko, along with his wife Imoinda, has been transported to Surinam from West Africa to labour in the plantations. His history is ‘set down’ by this anonymous young Englishwoman, the daughter of the newly appointed deputy governor, who has just died.
The narrator is struck by the couple’s native dignity. Their beauty is anything but native. Oroonoko (renamed ‘Caesar’ by his captors) has straight hair and ‘Roman’, not negroid, features. He is less a noble savage, a hundred years avant la lettre, than a noble, tout court. Oroonoko is no common slave. He kills two tigers and has a closely described battle with an electric (‘benumbing’) eel. When Imoinda becomes pregnant, Oroonoko is determined that his son shall not be born into slavery. He organises an uprising, and is cheated into surrendering on the point of victory.
Realising it is the end, Oroonoko cuts off Imoinda’s face, after he has cut her throat, so no one will see her beauty again. He disembowels himself, but is sewn up by surgeons to be executed, sadistically, for the delectation of a white rabble. Behn’s Royal Slave, calmly puffing away at his pipe as his genitals are cut off, is even more stoic, at the moment of regicide, than the Royal Captive, Charles I.
As Virginia Woolf instructs, the enlightened of her gender should ‘let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds’.