An Invisible Aphra Behn: Woman, Spy, Writer

An Invisible Life of Aphra Behn

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Virginia Woolf once said that "for most of history, anonymous was a woman." Translation: women did the work, men took the credit, and the byline mysteriously wandered off like a husband “stepping out to chat with a neighbor."

Aphra Behn was one of the first to put her name on the title page and then send the bill, becoming the first woman in England to make a living from writing. Of course, she didn’t limit herself to just one identity. Depending on the day, she answered to Aphra Behn, a few strategic aliases, and (when things got interesting) a government handler or two.

Playwright by daylight, spy by… well, also daylight. Secrecy was flexible back then!

While others were busy pretending women didn’t write, Behn was out there publishing plays, collecting money, and passing information to the crown like it was just another item on her to-do daily list.

Laundry, manuscripts, light espionage... you name it!

In short, where most women were forced into anonymity, Aphra Behn treated identity like a wardrobe change—and made sure every version of herself got remembered.

Birth: Somewhere, Sometime, Sort Of 

We know Aphra was baptized in Canterbury, England, on 14 December 1640, which strongly suggests she was in England at that time. Beyond that, the historical record shrugs... Biographers throw out possibilities like Wye or Harbledown for her birthplace, and her maiden name could have been Jonson, Amis, or Cooper — essentially the 17th-century version of ticking “other” on every form.  

Her parents’ jobs are also speculative: her mother might have been a nurse, her father maybe a barber, or perhaps historians just opened a 1600s career generator. The family seems to have traveled to the West Indies, but we do not really know why; we also don't know whether Aphra had siblings, or whether the gaps are due to time or to Aphra carefully blurring the details in case anyone checked her LinkedIn in 2026.

Relationship Status: It’s Complicated (And No Doubt - it's OVER!)

Behn’s love life reads like badly preserved gossip. She appears to have been engaged to John Halse and then suddenly married Johan Behn, who promptly disappears from the record, as if he realized his wife outwrote and out-earned him.  

We do not know if he died or they separated, but given that she kept his surname for the rest of her life, “tragic widow” seems more likely than “could not be bothered to update my passport details.” It is often speculated that they met in Surinam (then also called Dutch Guiana, now Suriname), where Johan may have been a slave trader.

Aphra’s most controversial work, “Oroonoko,” is about an enslaved African man, which strongly suggests she had direct exposure to the slave trade and its horrors.  

The text is famously ambiguous and strange, and scholars have wondered whether the narrator might be Aphra herself, even though the slave uprising in the story seems fictional. 

It seems Johan Behn was Dutch or German, which neatly explains why she later spent time in Holland spying (Surinam passed into Dutch control in 1667 after the Second Anglo-Dutch War, and Aphra may have been quietly gathering information for the British amid all this colonial rebranding).

Spy Mission: Underfunded, Undersupported, Unpaid

What we do know clearly is that in 1666, Behn was in Antwerp working as a spy for Charles II. Her mission: persuade an existing spy, William Scot, to become a double agent.  

Charles II had good reason to care, since Scot’s father, Thomas Scot, had signed the death warrant of Charles I, the king’s father, during the English Revolution. This was less “casual office politics” and more “multi-generational vendetta.”

The mission was, to put it kindly, a train wreck... Aphra Behn was not properly briefed or funded and ended up selling her jewelry just to stay alive. Charles II, who was supposed to pay her salary and expenses, simply never paid — an early example of a monarch ghosting his freelancer. 

She failed to turn William Scot into an agent, and there is evidence that he might have instead extracted information from her, meaning the double-agent plan backfired in the most literal way. The one upside: she landed in debtor’s prison and started writing and selling her work right there. So this unfortunate case accidentally launched her literary career because the king stiffed her on expenses.

Kings, Coups, And A Royal Baby Boom

Aphra Behn had supported the restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, having been born during the English Revolution. She died in 1689, after Charles II and James II had abdicated and been replaced by co-monarchs Mary II and William III.

But let me explain a bit... Behn’s relationship with Charles II remained extremely messy. He tried to have her arrested when she mocked one of his 13 illegitimate children in her play “Romulus and Hersilia.”  

Since he had no legitimate children, his death sparked a full-blown succession crisis. Behn allied herself with the Tories, who supported his brother James II, and she wrote plays in his favour, while their rivals, the Whigs, wanted James out of the line of succession because he was Catholic. 

James II managed only about three years on the throne before effectively abdicating by leaving the country in 1688, at which point his daughter Mary and her husband William (also his nephew, because royal family trees love a loop) took over as co-monarchs.

The Tories eventually became a political party and governed the UK as recently as 2010–2024, proving that once British politics chooses a team, it sticks. 

As for royal fertility, if you think Charles II’s 13 illegitimate children were a lot, James II reportedly had around 27 children in total, presumably requiring a seating plan the size of a football stadium for Christmas.

 Loud, Female, And Not Here To Be Polite

In the middle of all this chaos, Behn remained gloriously vocal. She promoted some nobles, ridiculed others, wrote about the transatlantic slave trade, explored female desire in “The Disappointment,” and cast Charles II’s mistress in her play “The Rover” like it was the most natural bit of stunt casting in the world. 

She argued loudly for gender equality and for women’s right to education at a time when women were expected to be grateful for owning a quill.

Behn herself likely did not receive a formal education. She may have attended a church school near her uncertain hometown, though some scholars go so far as to wonder if she might have been illiterate, which would make her later output either impossible or extremely impressive performance art. 

She also insisted that women lacked “achievements” because they were locked out of schools, not because they lacked talent. 

Her plays were often criticised specifically because a woman had written them. In “The Dutch Lover,” Behn uses the prologue to clap back directly at misogynists and hecklers, delivering a long, sharp, 17th-century subtweet on stage.

Her play “The Forc’d Marriage” also goes after the sexism of her era. The plot, with a farcical energy reminiscent of “Twelfth Night,” supports women’s rights and attacks enforced marriages as both unjust and absurd. 

After Oliver Cromwell’s joyless regime banned theatre altogether, the Restoration turned the stage into a kind of national pressure-release valve, where writers like Behn could sneak in radical ideas under the cover of jokes, wigs, and improbable disguises.  

“Oroonoko”: Anti-Slavery, Pro-Slavery, Or Just A Mess?

Behn’s best-known work, “Oroonoko,” published in 1688, is as politically tangled as its reputation suggests. It tells the story of an African prince enslaved and taken to Surinam, and it has kept academics busy arguing about it ever since. Oroonoko’s enslavement is portrayed as tragic, and the slave trader (possibly modeled on Behn’s husband) has been labeled the most villainous character in the book.

Oroonoko himself is described in heavily Europeanised terms: “his nose was rising and Roman, instead of African and flat. His mouth the finest shape that could be seen; far from those great turned lips which are so natural to the rest of the negroes.” He is also renamed Caesar by his enslavers, as if being colonized once was not quite enough. His proximity to whiteness seems to be a key part of why he is allowed any sympathy in the narrative at all, while other enslaved people fade into the background. 

The novel ends with his brutal death and the line, “Thus died this great man, worthy of a better fate,” which sounds suitably tragic but does not untangle the politics behind it.

“Oroonoko” is not a 100% clean anti-slavery text. The hero himself supports slavery and the exploitation of others under certain conditions, which is not exactly the moral clarity one might hope for...

The narrator appears to accept slavery as a natural institution, while arguing that this one particular man should not have been enslaved. It is, in short, a deeply uncomfortable, contradictory work — the kind that forces readers to sit with how messy early “sympathy” for enslaved people could be.

Final Act: Poverty, Legacy, And A Long Memory

“Oroonoko” appeared just one year before Behn’s death in 1689. She was around 48, living in London, and in poor health after years of scraping by. 

After her death, much of her work was either forgotten or denounced, largely by male critics shocked that a woman might write openly about sex, power, and politics in poems like “The Disappointment.” 

In the 20th century, feminist scholars and writers such as Virginia Woolf helped bring her back into the spotlight: because Aphra Behn was a sharp, funny, unapologetic trailblazer whose politics and style made her stand out even in an era full of chaos and scandal. 

As one critic put it, “Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, and Mrs. Gaskell were the true inheritors of the independent spirit of the admirable Mrs. Behn,” which is basically the 19th-century version of being tagged as the original influencer.

All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn; for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. Virginia Woolf