MY LIFE WITH APHRA BEHN

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In this very personal tribute to Aphra Behn, Maureen Duffy reminisces how she went through the curriculum for a degree in English literature without ever hearing the name of Aphra Behn, and how she discovered the Restoration author in the early 1970s—which was still a time when women writers before Austen did not exist in the canon. It was Virginia Woolf who inspired her interest at a time when very few facts about Behn's life were known—neither her family background nor her early life, nor even whether she had really travelled to Surinam. She tells how through her research for The Passionate Shepherdess (1977) she managed to retrace Behn's life and to free her from the accusation of lying. Duffy is particularly drawn to Behn because, like herself, she wrote in a variety of genres and had to adapt to the demands of the market. She admires her androgynous voice and her ability to inhabit the characters of her male figures convincingly, by which she set an example to later women writers, whose freedom of expression, however, was eroded by prudery—a prudery against which she herself had to fight. Throughout her career, she was drawn back to Behn again and again, most recently in a dramatic monologue spoken by Sappho from the Elysian Fields, whose favourite among the poets there is Aphra Behn. Duffy is convinced that despite the success of modern women writers in many genres, there is still a lamentable imbalance in the critical attention given to male and female artists, so that Behn's insistence on equality of treatment remains relevant right to this day.