Author: Janet Todd
Subject: Studies/Literature/History
Cloth ISBN 0-8135-2455-5
Pages: 550 pp. 35 b & w illus.
Description: The first biography to unmask the elusive 17th-century author.

Janet Todd's brilliant biography of Aphra Behn, the poet, playwright and Royalist spy, is as much a guide to negotiating a safe passage through Restoration court intrigue as it is the story of a life. So little is known of Behn's early years that any attempt to tell her tale becomes in itself some kind of detective work. Todd weaves a story together from what little evidence there is with precision, verve and confidence. . . . Witty and pugnacious, Todd's book is as much a window on the public cacophony of the era as it is a portrait of a playwright.--The Independent

A continual masquerader in character and in sexuality, Behn played numerous roles, altered personalities, mixed fact and fiction, and kept political and social details hidden from readers, lovers, and politicians alike. This definitive biography is the first to draw on Behn's complete works and newly discovered documents in Britain and the Netherlands.

Aphra Behn (1640?-1689) lived and died with the Restoration, withwhose license and liberty she became synonymous. The first woman to earn her living from writing, she composed at least nineteen plays, fiction, poetry and translations, and traveled as a spy to Holland and possibly to Surinam in South American on behalf of Charles II's government.

Behn is a mass of contradictions: a high Tory who disliked traditional power structures; a powerful, autonomous woman who depended on men's approval; a woman who desired men and women, and who become involved in intense political activity, yet craved ease. The book uncovers Behn's assertive, duplicitous, sensual character and illustrates the openly erotic nature of her writings, her exploration of desire, sexual excitement and disappointment, which later made her a byword for lewdness. It reveals historical sources and court cases behind some of her most famous "fictions."

As well as recounting Behn's story, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn illuminates the political and social background of the period, the court intrigue, the theater and its protagonists, London life before and after the Restoration, the Popish Plot, and the Monmouth Rebellion. Behn's relationships with Dryden and Rochester, the Stuart kings, Nell Gwyn, the Duchess of Mazarine, and many others make her story a fascinating combination of literature, politics, sex, and intrigue.

Aphra Behn's life has long been shrouded in mystery. Janet Todd now uncovers the secrets behind a free-thinking writer whose ideas and achievements are as radical and relevant for modern times as they were contentious and revolutionary in her own.

Janet Todd is a professor of English literature at the University of East Anglia and lives in Norwich, England. The author of many works, including The Sign of Angellica: Women, Writing and Fiction, 1660-1800 and Women's Friendship in Literature, and editor of The Works of Aphra Behn and of the Penguin Oroonoko, The Rover, and Other Works, she has written and taught widely on English literature and women's writing.