Aphra Behn in Crime Fiction – The Writer’s Afterlives in Recent Novels

Abstract

As part of a wider trend of remedying the past neglect of historic women, their lives are currently being reimagined by writers and artists. This has led to a proliferation of biopics, biofiction and (popular) biographies dedicated to this task. Crime fiction writers, likewise, have approached secret, hidden lives of forgotten females. This paper examines how recent crime novels have re-created the life of the early-modern writer Aphra Behn (1640–1689), employing typical features of the genre. Aphra Behn has recently received much attention: she is famed as the first female writer to have ‘made money by [her] pen’ (Woolf), and her prose narrative Oroonoko has become central to the history of the early novel. Still, many of the details of her life have remained hidden, leaving crime writers with fascinating possibilities to explore. Next to analysing selected novels, the article examines the wider possibilities of crime writing as life-writing.