MANUSCRIPT: Aphra Behn (manuscript notes).
Manuscript Notes
Sackville-West, Vita. Notes for Aphra Behn. 1927.
Foolscap; ca. 50 leaves of unlined wove paper; black, blue, and brown ink manuscript on rectos and occasional versos; vellum boards; manuscript title label on cover.
Manuscript research notes on Aphra Behn (ca. 1640-189); with notes jotted on later pages regarding Caroline Clive, Alice Meynell, George Eliot, Christina Rossetti and other women of letters. The first woman to make a living, quite scandalously at the time, in the literary arts, Behn has risen in the canon largely through the influence of Vita, with her biography; of Virginia Woolf, with A Room of One’s Own; and of contemporary scholars who look to them for guidance. She is now viewed among the most influential playwrights of her time, and an accomplished novelist and poet.
In this slim volume Vita reveals the compositional process behind one of her most significant works. In addition to an outline of the biography Gerald Howe would publish in 1927 as part of the second volume in the Representative Women series edited by Francis Birrell, titled Six Brilliant English Women (see Cross A15), she includes herein a bibliography of Behn’s works: fiction, poetry, and drama; several pages of biographical notes with “authorities” for the information on facing pages; two pages of “Her character: comments by other writers”; a list of “petitions to the King: 1668”; notes on Surinam from the Encyclopedia Britannica; nine pages of notes on her various works; and an index of the following subjects, themes, and individuals: love, desertion of women, passing of beauty, references to herself, Ben Johnson, jealousy, women & writing, perversion, women, slavery, fops, poets, London, accent of clergymen, and marriage.
Vita sent a copy of the completed manuscript to Berlin to Harold, who pronounced it “a ripping book,” as much for its style, no doubt, as for its content. Even as early as 1927 the parallels between the lives of subject and biographer would have been clear to the most common reader. Both women wrote poetry, novels, and plays, and adapted original works from their own translations of foreign texts. Both wrote of sex, love, and friendship; of gender roles, and homosexuality. Both wrote of themselves and of members of their circles, in terms hardly masking their identities. Arlene Stiebel writes, “Behn’s contemporary reputation as a poet was no less stunning than her notoriety as a dramatist. She was heralded as a successor to Sappho, inheriting the great gifts of the Greek poet in the best English tradition exemplified by Behn’s immediate predecessor, Katherine Philips.” She explains further that “…The breaking of boundaries in poetry, as in her life, caused Behn to be criticized as well as admired publicly,” that she was known for her ability to “portray scandalous material in an acceptable form,” and that sexual politics was one of her favored themes.
According to Katherine Rogers, “What is distinctive in Behn is her sympathetic representation of mature, unconventional women.” Numbering her among the best comic playwrights of her age, she writes,
If her plays are less polished than those of George Etherege and William Wycherley, it must be remembered that, unlike them, she had to support herself: she produced eighteen to twenty-one plays, in contrast to Etherege’s three and Wycherley’s four. Most of them were successful, and two, The Rover and The Emperor of the Moon, held the stage for three quarters of a century…. Behn demonstrated conclusively that a woman could openly succeed as an author if she was sufficiently tough.
(#7375)
Print Inquire
