Image: Aphra Behn’s gravestone in Westminster Abbey
Virginia Woolf wrote in A Room of One’s Own that “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. It is she — shady and amorous as she was — who makes it not quite fantastic for me to say to you to-night: Earn five hundred a year by your wits.” Woolf celebrates Behn as the first professional woman author; in this class, our reading of a wide range of Behn’s published work will enable us to critically analyze what “woman” and “author” meant in seventeenth-century England (as well as what Behn’s legacy has meant to readers since then). It will also allow us to explore a queer and trans past, trace how early modern women asserted claims to personal and sexual freedom, encounter early modern models of disability, and analyze how literature interacted with the rise of colonialism and transatlantic slavery in seventeenth-century England.
Readings will include poetry, drama, translations, and prose fiction by Behn, which we will put into conversation with works by other seventeenth-century writers and contemporary authors that help to illuminate the time of huge social and political change in which Behn wrote, and to trace her writing’s implications for our contemporary understandings of gender, sexuality, disability, race, and imperialism.
Assignments will likely include reading responses, an annotation assignment, analysis of a scholarly article, and an essay.
This course fulfils the pre-1700 historical breadth requirement!