Status Updates From The Secret Life of Aphra Behn

For my own future refence, I'll round off with a brief map of what's in which chapter:

Let me with Sappho and Orinda be
Oh ever sacred Nymph, adorn'd by thee;
And give my Verses Immortality.

Well, that's that finished (from here on is just notes, bibliography and index). Though it'll take me some time to go back through and add some notes for the last 90 pages...

Bulstrode Whitelocke succinctly sums up Aphra's (ex-)boyfriend: "an Atheist, a Sodomite professed, a corruptor of youth, & a Blasphemer of Christ".
[he was also probably a murderer, but that wasn't controversial enough in those days to be worth mentioning]

"Custom is unkind to our Sex; not to allow us free choice, but we above all Creatures must be forced to endure the formal recommendations of a Parent; and the more insupportable Addresses of an Odious Foppe, whilst the Obedient Daughter stands - thus - with her Hands pinn'd before her, a set look, few words, and a mein that cries - 'come marry me - out upon't!'"

(from 'Sir Patient Fancy')

A neat encapsulation of the changing times: in 1637, George Wilkins published a dour and moral Jacobean tragedy, The Miseries of Inforst Marriage; in the late 1670s, Aphra adapted the play, but this time as a farcical comedy, The Town-Fopp, complete with an accidential-lesbianism subplot...

A constant problem with a biography of Aphra Behn is that we know very, very little about her. But it could be worse: now we're being introduced to her fellow female poet, Ephelia - about whom we know absolutely nothing. Todd guesses she was a lowborn actress; others have suggested she was instead a duchess and the sister of the PM.

Todd claims they were friends but I don't think there's any basis for that?

Interesting the multiple instances of women openly bargaining for open relationships. Behn herself, in a poem to her married boyfriend cautions: "do not take / Freedoms you'll not to me allow". In Ravenscroft's 'Careless Lovers', the marriage negotiations include a demand for sexual liberty for both; Euphemia in Behn's 'The Dutch Lover' asks 'would you have conscience to tye me to harder conditions than I would you?'

The epilogue to a Dryden play has an actress (Dryden's girlfriend) explain why playwrights were now obsessed with having women play male roles: so that they can be "To the men women, and to the women men... in dreams both sexes may their passions ease". Not just an example of the popularity of gender fluidity in this period, but also interesting in explicitly appealing to the sexual gaze of the female audience.