Behn, Aphra << bayn or behn, AF ruh >> (1640-1689), was a dramatist, novelist, and poet. Using the pen name “Astraea,” she was the first woman in England to become a professional writer and the first woman to be accepted as a playwright in the male-dominated English theater. Her fiction was important in the development of the English novel, and her work influenced the novelist Henry Fielding. Behn wrote more than 15 plays and in her own time was best known as a dramatist. Today, she is best known for her novel Oroonoko (1688), a vivid, realistic story about a noble Black prince of Suriname who is enslaved by cruel white men. The novel is an important antislavery document.
Behn was born in 1640 in the county of Kent. She claimed to have learned the history of Prince Oroonoko while living as a child in Guyana. In 1666, King Charles II sent her to Holland as a spy. She returned to London in poverty a few years later and became a writer. She died on April 16, 1689, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
