Book of Awesome Women Writers - Becca Anderson

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for the entertainment of a small circle of friends, Aphra Behn was paid for her work and undertook it as her profession. Her circumstances were far different from those of such courtly ladies, as well. She was a widow of modest means and used her talent to survive.

      Behn’s parentage is unclear. We know she was born in 1640 and traveled with her foster family to Surinam in the West Indies. Some biographers say she was involved in a slave rebellion in 1663. That same year, she and her family and fellow travelers were the first Europeans to visit a tribe of Indians in the West Indies. The following year, she returned to England and married a London merchant, Johan Behn, who died of the plague in 1665.

      After the tragedy of her short-lived marriage, Aphra Behn needed an income and was fortunate to have an opportunity to enter King Charles II’s private force of spies. “Such public toils of state affairs [were] unusual with my sex or in my years,” she admitted. Behn was sent to Antwerp, where she proved to be a most able spy, but she did not receive her promised payment and was sent to a London debtor’s prison in 1668. While in jail, she determined never again to subject herself to anyone’s mercy and vowed to make her way independently and by her own wits.

      She wrote her first play and saw it published partly because of the sheer novelty that she was a woman. The play, The Forced Marriage, was staged in London in 1670. From then on, Behn’s progress was rapid. Her career as a professional playwright established, she wrote and published fourteen plays encompassing many styles from farce to drama, including The Rover, Sir Patient Fancy, The City Heiress, and The Roundheads. She also began publishing poetry and comic verse. Always skirting the edge of controversy, she wrote some very sensual poems which shocked the readers of the day and prompted Anne Finch to comment, “a little too loosely she writ.” Criticism of her work fell consistently into one of two extremes of either wild praise or scorching criticism and often focused on her femaleness: the “body of a Venus and the mind of a Minerva,” the “English Sappho,” or cruelly, “that lewd harlot.”

      Behn’s response was to carry on, pointing out that the great male writers of the day suffered no public shame for their openly erotic references. When the London theater fell on hard times after the glories of the Restoration, Behn turned her hand to writing prose fiction: Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, published in 1684, followed by The Fair, Jilt, Agnes de Castro, and her opus, Oroonoko. Written in 1688, Oroonoko was loosely autobiographical, a retelling in a fictionalized version of her journey to Surinam as a young woman and her protest against slavery. This account is widely regarded as the first novel in English literature.

      Sadly, a mere year after her triumph, she passed away, ill and impoverished. She continued to suffer denigration after her death by many who disapproved of her fiercely independent spirit. But Behn blazed the trail for every woman writer to come after her. Three hundred years later, Virginia Woolf penned this homage: “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.”

      I’ll only say as I have touched before, that plays have no great room for that which is men’s great advantage over women.

      Aphra Behn

      LADY MARY CHUDLEIGH

      A contemporary of Aphra Behn, Lady Mary Chudleigh wrote a verse response to British minister John Sprint, who in 1700 wrote The Bride-Woman’s Counselor, which instructed women to love, honor, and obey in no uncertain terms. Chudleigh wrote, in verse, a series including The Female Advocate; or A Plea for Just Liberty of the Tender Sex and notably Married Women and the Ladies Defense; or the Bride-Woman’s Counselor Answered. John Sprint was indeed resoundingly answered with Chudleigh’s beautifully wrought feminist rhetoric scorning the tacit rules that kept women “Debarred from knowledge, banished from the schools, And with the utmost industry bred fools,” entrapped in the “mean, low, trivial cares of life.” She exhorted women to “read and think, and think and read again.” Sadly, we know very little of her life except that she married Sir George Chudleigh and lost her children at very young ages. Her poems were crafted skillfully and with a keen intelligence and courageous idealism. Writing in 1700 and 1701, Lady Mary was well ahead of her time.

      Wife and servant are the same, But only differ in the name.

      Lady Mary Chudleigh, To the Ladies

      CHRISTINE DE PISAN the first woman writer to be published in English

      In the same way that, according to Virginia Woolf, English women writers are indebted to Aphra Behn, Italian women writers, including Nobel laureate Grazia Deledda, are indebted to Christine de Pisan. Three hundred years before Aphra Behn set pen to paper, de Pisan was earning her way as a writer.

      Born in 1364, she was the daughter of a scientist and scholar, Thomas de Pisan, a Venetian court-appointed astrologer to the French king Charles V. Her girlhood saw a rare advantage for Christine: a classical education. She loved France and claimed it as her heart’s home. Her father saw to it that she was educated as well as any man, and Christine learned French, Latin, arithmetic, and geometry. She married Etienne du Castel, who was nine years her senior, at fifteen. In three short years they had three children, and du Castel died around the time of the third baby’s birth. At barely nineteen, Christine de Pisan was left to support her children and several hapless relatives, and did so with her talent for prose and poetry.

      She claimed to write constantly, noting “in the short space of six years, between 1397 and 1403…fifteen important books, without mentioning minor essays, which, compiled, make seventy large copy-books.” Among her books are a biography of Charles V, another on Philip of Burgundy, and Le Livre de Paix. In the latter, an instruction on rearing princes and a rebuttal to the bestselling “bible of courtly love,” The Romance of the Rose, de Pisan sought to repair a woman’s reputation that had been ruined by the popular epic poem.

      After a writing career that lasted twenty-nine years, Christine retired to a convent. In 1429, just before her death, she wrote a book honoring Joan of Arc. It was, wrote Vicki León in Uppity Women of Medieval Times, “the only French book ever written about the Maid of Orleans in her lifetime.”

      While she was alive, Christine de Pisan received unstintingly positive reviews for her work and was compared favorably to Cicero and Cato. Her work stands the test of time. In 1521, Le Livre du duc des vraies aman was published in England as The Book of the Duke of True Lovers, the first book by a woman published in English. Her City of Women was rediscovered in the twentieth century and is taught in literature courses worldwide.

      ANNE BRADSTREET Pilgrim’s Progress

      Fifty years before Aphra Behn shocked English society, Anne Bradstreet wrote the first book of poetry published in the American colonies. Upon arriving with her family in 1630, Anne Bradstreet saw the raw new America as an opportunity to create a new way of being: “I found a new world and new manners, at which my heart rose,” she wrote.

      She was at once a pioneer and a typically religious member of her Puritan community. She had come from a privileged background afforded her by her father, Thomas Dudley, who ran the estate of an earl of Lincoln. Anne Bradstreet was allowed to visit the earl’s library freely, and she took full advantage, reading religious texts, poetry, and classics exhaustively.

      In 1628, she married Simon Bradstreet, a graduate of Cambridge who worked as a steward for the earl. Anne’s husband was nine years older than she and equally educated. Life on the earl’s estate was filled with ease, comfort, and security, but that soon changed. The devout religiosity of the Dudleys led them to believe they should prove their devotion to God through trials and tribulations. These they found in plentitude in the New World. The whole family moved lock, stock, and barrel to the Massachusetts colony, where Anne’s father and husband both served as governors. They suffered from the cold, malaria, starvation, and the harsh, unforgiving climate of this savage new world.

      Part of the Puritan ethos included stringent second-class status for all women, for it was God’s

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