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Whatever men could say to one another or to their surgeons they saw no harm in saying to women. We have to remember how Sir Walter Scott's great-aunt, about the very time when Diderot was writing to Mademoiselle Voland, had heard Mrs. Aphra Behn's books read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London.
When in 1696 Thomas Southerne adapted Oroonoko from the novel of Mrs. Aphra Behn and presented in London the story of the African prince who was stolen from his native Angola, no one saw any reason why the Negro should not be a subject for serious treatment on the stage, and the play was a great success, lasting for decades.
No one save a historian would now read the corrupting works of Mrs. Aphra Behn; and yet it is a fact that those novels were read aloud among companies of ladies. A man winces now if he is obliged to turn to them; the girls in the "good old times" heard them with never a blush. Wherever we turn we find the same steady advance.
My aunt lent me an abundance of books after that famous "Travels" of Mr. Gulliver. Now and then my father looked at what she gave me, but he soon tired of this, and fell asleep in the great oak chair which Governor Penn gave my grandfather. Many volumes, and some queer ones, I fell upon in my aunt's house, but, save once, against the naughtiness of Mrs. Aphra Behn, she never interfered.
In short, it is easy to make out a case by a rhetorical use of the facts on one side; but, if we look at all the facts, the matter presents greater difficulties. Again, it is to be noted that in several countries the first women who have taken prominent part in literature have been as bad as the men; as, for instance, Marguerite of Navarre and Mrs. Aphra Behn.
Such were also the Roundheads and the Banished Cavaliers of Mrs. Aphra Behn, who was a female spy in the service of Charles II., at Antwerp, and one of the coarsest of the Restoration comedians. The profession of piety had become so disagreeable that a shameless cynicism was now considered the mark of a gentleman.
In Defoe, where the record of imaginary fact was carried on with so much ingenuity and knowledge, the qualities we have just mentioned are notably absent; nor can it be said that we find them in any prose-writer of fiction earlier than Richardson, except in some very slight and imperfect degree in Aphra Behn, especially in her Rousseauish novel of Oroonoko.
Autobiography was almost the only form of writing not attempted by Eliza Haywood in the course of her long career as an adventuress in letters. Unlike Mme de Villedieu or Mrs. Aphra Behn's fictitious exploits and amorous correspondence . Indeed the first biographer of Mrs.
His tragedies Isabella, or the Fatal Marriage and Oroonoko , both founded on tales by Mrs. Aphra Behn, are powerful presentations of human suffering. His comedies are amusing, but gross. Southerne had business ability enough to make play-writing pay, and the amounts he received for his productions fairly staggered his friend Dryden.
Not many things show Scott's golden equity and fairness better. He is perhaps "a little kind" to Campbell, who was, one fears, an extra-irritable specimen of the irritable race: but this is venial. And probably he did not mean the stigma which might be inferred from the conjunction of "Aphra and Orinda." My dear friend,
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