BEHN, APHRA (1640-1689), writer of prose fictions, sometime intelligencer of the Council of State, and the first woman in the Commonwealth to live wholly by her pen, was born in Kent, of a family named Johnson, in 1640. Of her youth the one considerable fact is the removal of her family, about her three-and-twentieth year, to Surinam, upon the main of Guiana, where her father had obtained a small interest in the plantation and died before he could take it up. The daughter remained the better part of a year upon the Surinam river, and observed the country, the planters, and the usage of the enslaved with an exactness of which the proof came five-and-twenty years afterward. Returning to London, she married Behn, a merchant of the City, of Dutch extraction, who died within a few years and left her little besides the name she was to make remembered.
It was as a young widow of small means and serviceable Dutch that the Council of State (q.v.) employed her, in the later years of the Second Dutch War, as its intelligencer at Antwerp. The service is plainly attested and asks no dressing. She passed under the sign of Astrea; corresponded in cipher with the Council's office; and sent home despatches upon the movements and the credit of the exiled Stuart court and its French paymasters, which survive among the Council's papers, and which are written with the plainness of a woman doing dangerous work for an employer slow to pay for it. Her letters press for her expenses with a persistence no reader of them will grudge her; what use the Council made of her intelligence, the Council, after its manner, did not record. She came home poor, and made herself, by labour alone, the thing the Commonwealth had not seen before her: a woman keeping herself, and keeping her independence, wholly by writing.
Her production was various — fictions, verses, translations from the French — and unequal, as the work of a writer paid by the sheet will be; the fictions are the part that has lasted, and the first of them all is "The Slave of Surinam, a True History" (1688): the history of an African prince, stolen out of Guinea with his bride, sold into the Surinam plantation, and done to death there upon the failure of the rising he led. She gives it as of her own witnessing, out of the years when Surinam was yet an English plantation, before its cession, at the Peace of Breda in 1667, to the United Provinces (q.v.). The book argues nothing general. It sets down, in the particulars of one man, what a trade in men is — the market, the passage, the brand, the price — and it leaves the general conclusion to the reader, with a confidence the event has justified, though not quickly. Her style is everywhere a speaking style, rapid, unstudied, and sure of its hearer; the graces it wants are the graces that are learned, and the force it has is the force that is not.
It is the earliest great testimony in our letters against the usage of the trade, and the Commonwealth has long agreed to be proud of it. The emancipation societies read it aloud at their meetings beside the narrative of Cyrus Freeman (q.v.), and their lecturers were accustomed to call it the first witness heard in the long trial. The pride is just, and it is now cheaply held. The reader who would weigh it exactly will observe that the history was printed in 1688; that the Act for the Suppression of the Trade in Men followed in 1807; and that a book may fairly be called prophetic which had been proved right for a hundred and nineteen years before it was acted upon.
She died in 1689, in her forty-ninth year, and lies buried in the cloister at Westminster. Her fictions opened the road the novel (q.v.) has since travelled; and every woman who has lived by letters in the Commonwealth — Mehitabel Shore (q.v.) is the chief of them — has practised upon the precedent she set. The account of that inheritance belongs to another place (see LITERATURE OF THE COMMONWEALTH, THE); what is owed to Behn herself is exact, and may be exactly paid. She is not the greatest of our writers of fiction. She is the first of them; and she is the first woman of our letters who asked leave of nobody — a plain distinction, which two centuries have found no occasion to amend. (H. M.)