Little is certain about her early years: possibly the daughter of Bartholomew and Elizabeth Johnson of Kent; in her youth probably went to Surinam, where her (foster?) father had been given a colonial post but died en route. While there, was involved with a slave rising (see her prose romance Oroonoko, 1688); returning to England presumably married a (Dutch?) tradesman who soon died. In 1666, was sent as a spy to Holland; was not paid adequately, returned to London, and was briefly imprisoned for debt. In 1670 began her career as the first professional woman writer, producing some sixteen plays (notably The Forc’d Marriage and The Rover) in nineteen years. Royalist, pro-Catholic, libertine, her acquaintance ranged from the Earl of Rochester to Nell Gwynne. A vicious lampoon survives from her declining years:
Doth that lewd harlot, that poetic queen
Fam’d through Whitefriars, you know who I mean,
Mend for reproof, others set up in spight
To flux, take glisters, vomits, purge and write.
Long with a sciatica, she’s beside lame,
Her limbs distortur’d, nerves shrunk up with pain,
And therefore I’ll all sharp reflections shun,
Poverty, poetry, pox, are plagues enough for one.
Perhaps surprisingly, is buried in Westminster Abbey, under a stone reading, ‘Here lies a Proof that wit can never be / Defence enough against Mortality’.
Poems upon several occasions, with a voyage to the island of Love (London, 1684); Lycidus, or the Lover in Fashion … Poems by Several Hands (London, 1688); Montague Summers (ed.), The Works of Aphra Behn (London: Heinemann, 1915); Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess: Aphra Behn 1640–1689 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1977).