Aphra Behn is one of those figures from history who are often shrouded in mystery and have retained an element of adventure and excitement, even after several centuries. Janet Todd does a remarkable job at bringing Behn's life to us in an accessible and fascinating book. Recommended.

This is a new Aphra revised and updated edition of A Secret Life, a book about the life and work of Aphra Behn, very importan female writer of the XVII century. An important read for those who like to know abour women in literature (and do not want to stay only in contemporary writers).

Aphra Behn was an English playwright, novelist, and poet. She is known in history as the first woman to ever make her living as a professional writer. However, we know very little of the woman who shocked all of England with her scandalous plays. Mrs. Todd attempts to create a portrait of this controversial woman by showing her as a spy and a feminist. She proves that Aphra Behn is a woman worth remembering.

Before I read this revised biography of Aphra Behn, I did not know much about her. The only thing I knew of her was that she wrote Oroonoko. Therefore, I was intrigued to read more about this little known figure. Because there are very few known facts about Aphra Behn’s life, there is much speculation about Aphra in A Secret Life. Mrs.Todd puts together the pieces of her cryptic life. Aphra Behn is shown to be the daughter of a barber. Her mother is the nanny for a noble family. Aphra grew up alongside the children of nobles and was given an education. Her connection to nobility allowed her to become an English spy in Surinam and Holland. Mrs. Todd relies on Aphra Behn’s own writings to prove her evidence as a spy.

Mrs. Todd also uses Aphra Behn’s writings to delve deep into Aphra’s personal life and beliefs. She tackles the subject on the many loves in Aphra’s life and whether she was married. Her life as a widow was what turned her to writing. Mrs. Todd also believed that Jack Hoyle was Aphra’s greatest love and muse. Mrs. Todd also portrays her as a champion for women’s rights. She believed that women should recieve an education. She was also an abolitionist. Thus, Mrs. Todd shows Aphra to be a woman ahead of her time.

Overall, this biography is the closest we can ever come to knowing Aphra Behn. Her life was often in the shadows, and Mrs. Todd attempts to bring her out of the shadows. While there is little evidence to her speculations, Mrs. Todd does make a strong case. While we may never know who she truly was, it is clear that Aphra was a fascinating woman. Aphra deserves to be remembered for her accomplishments, and Mrs. Todd’s biography proves why Aphra continues to be studied in colleges.

A deservedly hefty literary biography of English's first female professional writer*, who got things off to a good start by also being a bisexual libertine and spy (given which, is it any wonder that I find the anointing of Jane Austen as The Canonical Female Writer rather anodyne in comparison?). Although one of the disappointments here is that on the whole Behn doesn't seem to have been a very good spy, which is a shame, because I was rather fond of the more accomplished fictional version in Daniel O'Mahony's underappreciated <i>Newtons Sleep</i>. Still, one can cling to the get-out that in the early years, much of the life is necessarily surmise - though unlike some biographers, Todd is always careful to admit as much. And even if the version of Behn she pieces together is sometimes unprovable, at the very least it sheds fascinating light on her world. At times it feels almost like a Squire Haggard pastiche of history: livestock had to be imported to Surinam because bats would eat their udders; important documents have been consumed by rats; there's a very <i>Big Lebowski</i> passage where the author is going through a colony's records looking for Johnsons. Things settle down slightly once Behn is back in London, and the historical detective work is more a case of reading the various sources, lampoons and counterblasts which together record the fascinating/incestuous literary scene of the Restoration capital, in which Behn settles down to the writing that would make her name - as against her letters from the Low Countries during the spying phase, which more recall <i>Monty Python</i>'s great Scottish poet, or Peter Ackroyd's life of Poe.

And at her best, what a writer she was! Like her contemporary and chum Rochester, she was Cavalier in the best possible sense (whereas the previous generation of Cavalier poets, the peers of Charles I rather than II, tend on the page to be a little bit limp, a tad Fotherington-Thomas). One of my favourite lines in the book: "Behn did not equate intelligence with this introspection, as later ages would do; she considered that a resolute triviality was as intellectually reasonable a response to an analysis of the human predicament as concentrating on the 'depths' of something presumed to be the 'self'." Which is slightly harsh on later ages - what of Wilde, Coward, Cabell? The resolutely and defiantly flippant intellect was not, thank heavens, unique to Behn's moment. But by heavens they did it with aplomb. Obviously, even at the time that didn't go down well with everyone - Todd is interesting in tracing the tides in the degree to which, at any given point, Behn is being attacked for her gender, her lewdness, her plagiarisms, or simply for being a jobbing writer rather than a leisured amateur. Apart from anything else, the old argument about rules in drama was having one of its flare-ups. The faction with a hard-on for Aristotle's unities was on this occasion exemplified by the tedious Shadwell, declaiming at anyone fool enough to listen that a 'proper' play should take a year to write, which was hardly viable if you had bills to pay. This passage had already made me think of Keats' knife-beautiful line about a later swarm of the same dull breed, who played upon a rocking horse and thought it Pegasus - so it came as no surprise when Todd added that a subsequent and more notorious exponent of this tediously constrained school of writing, the odious Pope, had also set himself against Behn. Though, typically of that mendacious little worm, he needed to misquote her to make the charges stick. And still fails, just like always. But, for all that giving that prick a kicking is always fun (he would surely be the first card in any deck of Great Incels In History), I digress. The point being, Behn was important not only in taking on the prigs, but in how she took them on. Rather than insisting that no, drama was moral, she had the wit to shift the goalposts and assert, quite correctly, that morality was not its purpose nor its metric. It was fun, and that was enough.

Still, Todd is careful to remind us that, while Behn was ahead of her time in many respects, that certainly doesn't make her a modern in petticoats. <i>Oronooko</i> may be Behn's most famous work, with a noble black hero and a villainous slaver, but in principle Behn was fine with slavery so long as only the baser sort were enslaved. Which was not necessarily a racial thing - in these early days of empire, indentured white servants in Surinam faced treatment roughly as appalling as black slaves, and while there could obviously be a racial angle to proceedings, the spurious intellectual architecture of later imperial racism had not yet been erected. Similarly, she was a Tory in the oldest sense, being firmly Jacobite and writing several works intended to undermine Monmouth and his faction, or shore up James II against the threat of William. Which makes a degree of sense given when she lived - her scepticism of the bourgeois mob, her belief that democratic rhetoric was only ever a fig-leaf for would-be tyrants, made ample sense given she lived through the grim, hypocritical, authoritarian years of Puritan rule. The notion that she'd been lucky in her monarch, that they might not all be as liberal as Charles II, seems simply not to have occurred to her - a legitimate monarch was simply safer than the alternative, even if that meant hewing to James II, who generally comes across as one of our least likable sovereigns, but by whom Behn seems to have been genuinely enthused. Still, I suppose he did like the theatre...and you can understand why she was unimpressed by the the ludicrous paranoia around the supposed Popish Plot, which more than slightly recalls Paul Dacre's <i>Mail</i> in its attempts to uncover a purported enemy within, plotting to drag Britain back under Continental dominion. And indeed, the way in which Charles was fought over as symbol, despite his own actions not always helping the narrative, is not dissimilar to the way Parliamentary sovereignty is now exactly the thing for which the <i>Heil</i> et al fight, unless and until it does something they don't like when...look! Over there! An enemy of the people!

As you might infer from the subtitle, teasing out the unresolved contradictions in Behn feels like the part of this project which Todd most enjoyed. Behn was a firm believer in absolute monarchy - while never accepting what was usually its corollary, the domestic power of men over women. Hell, she was ambivalent even about the effect of Stuart reforms on the squirearchy - which was at once a local replica and image of the monarchy to the nation, yet a brake and barrier to the very power it figured. And as for the importance of organised religion, again normally co-morbid with Tory sentiments...well, she was far too much the freethinker and libertine for that, even if she was sometimes given to dissembling on the point. Similarly, given the age and the milieu in which she lived, Behn's attitude to sex and gender is a most fascinating mess. Particularly in some of the earlier plays, Todd finds the most compelling female characters tend to be animated by a shared sense of gender as a game and sex a pleasure - but this vision seems very much to darken as Behn ages, and be overtaken by an awareness of the double standard by which women are judged, and the knowledge that men may rage or bluster, but women must plan and choose their steps carefully. Part of this seems tied to a sense that Behn felt like 'one of the boys', hanging out with rakes and wits whose verse and manner might be misogynous, but not towards her. Which in turn might inform the way that, in the plays, it's only the bashful and conventional female characters at risk of male sexual violence, never the lively and witty ones (and as if any reminder were needed of how wrong that assessment is, it was right after reading that section that I saw last week's dreadful news of an Australian stand-up raped and murdered on her way back from a gig). And then as Behn grew older, and the friends died or fell out, to be replaced by a new generation of literary men...well, the jibes grew nastier. And so there comes a more pointed sense of how fucked up the relations between the sexes were, where men can be put off by willingness in women, but so too women by an excess of biddability in men. Todd suggests that it was incresingly brought home to Behn that the male rake remains part of society in a way the female rake cannot, and by the later plays it seems as if the relationship of pimp and punk - think Brecht and Weill's 'Tango Ballad', a quarter-millennium early - is about as good as it gets.

And yet, set against what might seem a gender essentialism there, always a certain queerness. Behn's probable longest-term lover, Hoyle, was bi, and whether because of his orientation, some ailment, the contraceptive limitations of the day, or simple personal preference, Todd suspects that the relationship may never have been conventionally consummated. Here, because even a writer considered bawdy in the 17th century doesn't go into the sort of detail one expects from a modern sex blogger, we return again to realms of surmise - but Todd makes a fairly convincing case. Particularly when she also draws in the symbolism and language of Behn's pastoral writing to suggest an identification of the mythical Golden Age with a gentler, non-penetrative sexuality. Against which, a keen awareness of the less gentle forms polymorphous perversity can take. The most bleakly amusing, for me, being the observation of how that Renaissance stage mainstay, cross-dressing disguise, tends to work in Behn plays: young women can dress as men, sure, but since they will only ever convince as young men, it often doesn't profit them much. They're still lust objects for older men, after all, on top of which they can now legitimately be attacked in bouts of non-sexual violence.

Like most biographies, it gets more depressing as it goes along; friends die, health fails, opinions harden. The Jacobite sympathies, never easy to like, extend as far as defending the bloodthirsty Judge Jeffreys, and ever more tawdry hymns of praise to James II and his intimates - to which were often appended not-so-subtle hints that the best way for them to show what magnificent and rightful rulers they were would be to spend a little more in support of the arts [nudges, winks, extends hand]. You might expect a little light from the fact that <i>Oronooko</i>, for which Behn is best known nowadays, was a late work. But it's slightly eclipsed in the chapters addressing the period of its composition, much of its matter having already been dealt with in the earlier chapters discussing the overseas adventures which inspired it. And so, less than a week after the Glorious Revolution is sealed with coronation, Behn dies - as Todd notes, a rare case of a historical personage obligingly fitting into the era with which they're associated. And one is left with a nagging sense that it should have been a happier life, and a more productive one - but then, isn't that so often the way? And like Stoppard's vision of Wilde in <i>The Invention of Love</i>, Behn accomplished so much more by living when she did, at once ahead of her time and a perfect expression of it.

*In traditionally 'literary' forms, at any rate. Which Todd addresses in an early footnote, so I shall do likewise.

(Netgalley ARC. Over which I took far too long. Sorry, publisher. Sublisher)

A book that looks at an important figure in history that is often overlooked in history classes, masterfully written, and an engaging read.

With Aphra Behn being one of the first ever women to earn a living from writing, you would think that information about her would be more widely available. This is far from the case. A lot of the facts known about the 17th century playwright are basic and huge parts of her life (her early years, and period of marriage and the fate of her husband, for instance) are shrouded in a veil of mystery that we will never tear away. This means that a lot of Janet Todd’s 600-page account of the dramatist’s life airs strongly on the side of speculative non-fiction - sentences such as “it is safe to assume...”, “Aphra would probably have then…” and “Behn may have been aware of…” appear frequently in the text and now it is hard for me to decide, as a reader, if a good proportion of the information I have just learned is anywhere close to the truth.
I suppose that one positive of the sparse information in regards the book’s subject matter, is that it allows for Janet Todd to explore the social and political context of Aphra Behn’s life and the Restoration Era. Colonialism, the Anglo-Dutch Wars, the nature of Charles II’s reign, and the larger upheaval surrounding the monarchy are all topics that are explored in depth and ones that I found incredibly fascinating. Finding wider reading on those topics are now my next self-ascribed task.
But in regards to the subject of the biography: from Aphra Behn’s (possible) failed diversion into espionage, to her battle against the criticism from men about her plays being too bawdy or too immoral, a portrait is painted of an ambitious, witty, talented, complex woman who has managed to transcend the ages thanks to her immaculate prose. Playing with gender, sexual desire, politics and age, which were all subjects incredibly scandalous to be discussing in the 1600s, especially by a woman; it is clear to see the battle Aphra Behn faced and how she placed some of the first stones on the path towards the frank female freedom that we take for granted today.
As Virginia Woolf once wrote, “All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds…” and honestly, I think it takes a while for it to sink it just how true that statement rings.

Aphra Behn was a controversial figure who lived during the Restoration and therefore to write a decent and interesting biography is a really complicated task Janet Todd, a Guardian columnist and writer, did in an elegant manner. This monumental work on the Secret Life of Aphra Behn tries to uncover all the uncertainties that have surrounded the figure of Aphra Behn during her life and after.
Aphra Behn is mainly studied in English Literature Courses, not only in English-speaking countries, but also elsewhere, maybe not with the right attention she deserves. She is seen as the first woman professional writer to earn her living solely by her pen. In a male dominated society, for a woman to build her own career in the literary scene was very complicated, but fortunately she was a beautiful exception. As a writer, translator, dramatist and spy agent, she came to be an inspiring personality for the future generations of feminists. To understand better her life, Janet Todd included historical references in order to makes us understand how she was influenced and actively influenced her time.
What made her a writer in the English canon was her novella Oroonoko, dealing with slavery. This novella is nowadays a fundamental work in the Postcolonial Studies courses because it gives several pungent opinions on slavery, race and imperialism itself.
In conclusion, I think it's worthy to read this book in its entirety because it's written in an elegant style that makes the reading experience a wonderful time.

Aphra Behn was a spy, novelist, playwright and poet who lived in Restoration times. Her work, like her life, was packed with intrigue, very risqué and often fraught with coming up against the law and the establishment. Always short of money, yet she moved within the circles of nobility and some of the foremost literary figures of her day. Even by today’s standards, Aphra Behn would have been seen as remarkable, but given she was a woman living in the time of the Restoration then she could only be described as extraoridinary.
This book took a while to finish, not because it was too dry and academic (it was in fact a smooth read and highly engaging), but more because biographer Janet Todd has packed in as much into the book as Aphra Behn did into her life and I didn’t want to miss a thing.
There is no doubt this is a scholarly book by someone with an in-depth knowledge of Behn’s work and an appreciation of the way in which she manoeuvred her way up from her humble beginnings through to the highest levels of Restoration society.
The Secret Life of Aphra Behn constantly intrigues and entertains, not only because of the fascinating story of this woman, but also because of her biographer’s attention to detail and the insights into how to piece together the life of someone who might at times have slipped under the radar of historical documentation. This is particularly true of Behn’s early life. The way in which Todd assembles Behn’s developing career makes for a fascinating account of how to undertake historical research by considering the individual’s life in a historical and social context.
This makes this book not only a valuable resource for writers wanting inspiration of a lively and unusual character for any genre, but also a dissertation in how to do historical research through an indirect approach, picking up clues from the subject of the biography through their professional output (in Behn’s case, plays, novels and poetry) and social knowledge of that historical period, linked to relevant documentation. In this way Todd crafts a riveting tale of a rambunctious opportunist as well as a scholarly biography.
Highlights are an account of Behn’s spying activities and how she managed to maintain a toehold within the world of playwriting. Spying then it seemed was a very precarious affair, not only because of getting caught, but also because, despite working for the government, they might not be inclined to support your endeavours when you got out there. This often resulted in the spy running out of money due to lack of funding. Maintaining your position as a profitable playwright was equally as precarious, requiring a full understanding of the politics of the times. Someone you courted as a patron might be out of favour a few months later or worse, the play you wrote might touch the wrong political nerve in the eyes of your sponsors and public. The expression “I’ll make sure you’ll never work here again” was all too common in the arena of Restoration arts.
Behn certainly lived life to the full and very much on the edge, at a time where women had few rights. As her biographer, Todd, has managed to draw out fascinating insights of a larger than life character and place her work within the context of the contribution it made to those who came after her.

The Restoration Period is one of my favourites in the study of literature and Aphra Behn is in my top three figures from that period. Maybe my students wouldn't appreciate her genius quite as much as I do, but giving them access if the first step in pushing them in the direction of wonderful historical figures.

Todd has done a lovely job collecting information about Aphra Behn. While we can get bogged down in historical details, the picture she paints is as colourful as the figure herself. (Though, to be fair, I might be a bit biased.)

The 17th century dramatist, Aphra Behn, is a notoriously tricky subject for biographers to tackle. For such a gregarious and ostensibly dissolute figure, facts about her are rudimentary and her background is almost impenetrable - but that hasn't stopped the British scholar Janet Todd from achieving a phenomenal feat with her freshly revised life history of the dynamic playwright.

Behn is celebrated for being one of the first English women to earn a living from her pen. She courageously shattered many cultural conventions of her day, while in some ways remaining in step with her times. She was a major influence on female writers for years to come, but her prosopography is murky, which to some extent was intentional on her part.

“Aphra Behn is not so much a woman to be unmasked as an unending combination of masks and intrigue, and her work delivers different images and sometimes contradictory views.” – Janet Todd

Believed to have been born around 1640, Aphra Behn rose from obscurity to work as a secret agent in Antwerp for the newly returned English King. She lived through a time of immense political upheaval, when the decadent Charles II and his court returned from exile, ushering in a new era both in fashion and the arts.

Todd's research into the period is breathtaking, and the limited knowledge we possess about Behn is used to create a stout and thoroughly detailed biography, which reveals much about the people with whom she associated and the places she frequented in Restoration London. Inevitably, there is much speculation over the man she married, her intimate friendships and bisexuality – though, there is a wealth of information pertaining to her plays and poetry – however, this volume is as close as we are likely to get to the woman behind the mask.

A gripping portrait of an enigmatic character.

A competent and ambitious history of Aphra Benn, drawing on a life that is still shrouded in mystery.

Aphra Behn: A Secret Life is a detailed biography of the Restoration writer known for being a woman in a boys’ club, earning a living from her writing at a time when it was very uncommon for a woman to do so. Behn is one of those literary figures who doesn’t have a huge amount of written documentation about their life, so it is their primary texts that often have to provide clues or suggestions that a biographer can take up. Todd does this to paint a narrative about Aphra Behn rather than giving disjointed facts, using period detail, facts about others, and guesswork to fill in the large number of gaps.

Due to the varied life and times of Aphra Behn, the book covers a lot of different material, from Restoration politics to espionage by way of sex, theatre, and religion. This is a big biography bursting with detail that gives plenty of information about who everyone is, but still feels aimed at both people with specific academic interests and those wanting to read more about Behn not in a research capacity. It can be a little dry, but Todd doesn’t shy away from Restoration scandal and sex when it comes up. In style and content, it reads much like other literary biographies where the subject doesn’t have a huge amount of primary information about them, using their own works alongside snippets of records, historical background, and inspiration from others’ lives in the period.

This is a comprehensive biography that can to appeal to those who want to know more about Behn than a vague awareness of her life and works, or used as a reference for those reading her more closely.

I was always fascinated by the life of Aphra Behn, especially since watching Lucy Worsley's documentary "Harlots, Housewives and Heroines". Her life was truly an extrordinary life, and sadly, little was known about it. I said 'was'. Because this incredible, wondrous and breathtaking biography opens a door to usually overlooked parts of female history. It is, in the same time, history of an empire, history of the theathre, history of the espionage, but also a history of one woman, who risked everything and gained even more. I didn't have the time to read this fully, so I've read just about parts of her life that were especially interesting to me. It definitely made me want to buy a hardback copy one day and dive into it. Mesmerizing. Non-fiction that reads like fiction. Highly recommended.

This is an updated edition of Todd's 1996 The Secret Life of Aphra Behn with a new introduction and some attention to the scholarship on Behn over the last twenty years.

Behn is a complicated subject for biography as the sources are limited, sometimes covert, and Behn herself lived her life through a series of masques: Royalist spy, playwright, libertine. A woman with limited education without Latin, and without the benefits of either family or money, she made her own way in Restoration London.

Todd had done a masterful job of mining the sources that we have and has been rummaging around the archives to offer the fullest portrait to date of Behn as both woman and writer. Attentive to her various liaisons, and studiously refusing to romanticize her femininity, this embraces the complexities of Behn: while refusing to be confined to a conventional female role, she believed in hereditary monarchy, the divine right of kings, and had little time for ideas of democracy or a parliamentary constitution.

Todd inevitably draws on Behn's writings but not in any simple linear fashion. Instead she draws out Behn's concerns with sexual and gender politics, and the way she uses humour and satire to articulate her agenda without compromising her essential need to entertain not least because, unlike Rochester, for example, she had neither money nor social status outside of her profession as author.

So a complicated woman - and a scholarly biography which does her justice.