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In the period 1678 to 1730, the English press was undergoing some of the most important transformations in its history. In 1695, the lapse of the Licensing Act ended pre-publication censorship and restrictions on the number of printers. This event, combined with political turmoil, contributed to a major period of growth in the book trades, and women printers, publishers, and authors were among the first to seize new opportunities for political expression. Offering a new synthetic model for the study of the literary marketplace — one that breaks down boundaries which separate the study of texts' ideological content and form from the study of their material production — this study attends to all aspects of the production and dissemination of printed texts. In so doing, it redirects a spotlight previously focused on a small group of authors to a class spectrum of persons involved in the circulation of political ideas.

This chapter focuses on Aphra Behn. Behn was infamous for her forwardness in seeking publication (and profit) for her writing, for her bawdy plays and verse, and for her playful — and often playfully confrontational — attention to the rules governing heterosexual love. Behn reveals the cultural conflicts at work in the reworking of classical myths in Restoration poetry. She describes translation as both a sexual and a national contest. With heightened attention to the cultural meanings of myth and the increased availability of mythic stories, the ability to read myths in their original languages allowed the poet access to literary and cultural authority.

This book approaches the construction of literary authority and the literary canon during the 18th century through a study of the reception of the work of Aphra Behn. As one of the first professional writers of either sex in England, she participated in the redefinition of the author that attended the new literary market; and as the most prominent woman writer of the Restoration, she had an immense and complex significance for women writers in following generations. The 18th-century construction of Restoration writing in general, and Behn's in particular, as decadent and salacious, had profound effects on the tenor of that influence, and made her legacy to later female writers an uneasy one. Over the hundred years following her death, her image played an important, and very mixed, part in the process of the legitimation of the woman writer.

This chapter considers three aspects of the making of Aphra Behn's reputation: discussions of her within her lifetime; the growth of Behn biography in the years following her death; and the reception of Behn's verse. What unites these different parts of her story is the growth of a myth about Behn, which both drew on received notions of the relationship between a female writer and her work, and set the tone for the reception of later women writers. The myth is that Behn's writing reflects a life pre-eminently concerned with sexual love. The image of Behn which was to become dominant in the 18th century was that of a woman for whom (sexual) pleasure and poetry were intermingled. This view began to emerge in her lifetime, representing the narrowing-down of an originally much wider conception of her as a writer.

This chapter traces the different trajectories of Aphra Behn's 18th-century life as a dramatist and as a writer of fiction. Behn's fiction remained current in the later 18th century, with editions of Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister being published up to the 1760s and of Oroonoko up until 1800. The decisive shift in Behn's reputation as a novelist came with the novel's rise in status in the middle years of the century. In particular, the moralization of popular fiction, already under way with Penelope Aubin's work in the 1720s and consolidated by Samuel Richardson in the 1740s, led to new and unfavourable assessments of her novels. The chapter argues that the era of stage-reform, far from ruining her dramatic reputation, actually helped Behn to achieve the status of the first woman dramatist to become a long-running success on the London stage.

This chapter explores the connections between notions of influence, generation, and genealogy in the construction of literary traditions, and asks: what would it mean to be able, by the addition of the odd ‘h’, to talk about the sons of Aphra Behn? Undoubtedly Behn was a source to many 18th-century writers, but in current thinking this does not make her an influence. In this chapter, Harold Bloom explains his own very influential theory of influence. Clearly poetic fatherhood is here conceived as a spiritual relation, quite distinct from the transmission of mere verbal material. The importance of maintaining this matter-spirit distinction is evident in the contempt Bloom expresses for ‘those carrion-eaters of scholarship, the source hunters’, whose project may at first seem to resemble his own, but who show by their obsession with matter, and dead matter at that, that they do not understand the living spirit that passes between poets.

The evidence of 18th-century women's literary history shows many different ways of responding to Aphra Behn. This chapter has divided consideration of Behn's effect on her female successors into three sections. The first deals with the 1690s, when the recently deceased Astrea is an inescapable point of reference. In the second, the chapter focuses on the relations between Behn and a number of individual writers in the first half of the 18th century, arguing that for Susanna Centlivre and Delarivier Manley, Behn was most significant as a role-model for professional writing, while Jane Barker is influenced in a more complex and troubled way by Behn's work. The third section considers women writers' use of Behn in the later 18th century. Historical distance and an established female writing role allowed for a new detachment in the attitudes of women writers to her, but Hannah Cowley's adaptation from Behn showed that she could still be a significant influence.

This chapter traces the history of The Rover in 18th-century performance, a history that one can reconstruct patchily but in some detail from a number of sources, including contemporary playbills, comments and criticisms, a promptbook copy of the text, and two altered editions. The Rover flattered the Restoration court with a nostalgic image of its cavalier past. Much of this appeal remained in the 18th century, and was not overshadowed by the changes in the political situation and social mores that curtailed the stage-lives of some of Aphra Behn's other plays. Nevertheless, the play was also successfully performed at the court of William and Mary, and in later times, its royalism could easily shade into a kind of general patriotism perfectly well suited to the years of Whig ascendancy.

This chapter traces the metamorphosis of Oroonoko into a vehicle for anti-slavery sentiment, showing how this change coincided with a tendency to play down the significance of Aphra Behn as narrator and as author. Abolitionists had very little to say about Behn herself, and that little was not favourable; and the complex relationship between the black hero and the white woman who takes it on herself to tell his story was dropped from later versions. Here, the chapter concentrates on the way the tragedy of Oroonoko and Imoinda came to function in the early 18th century as an expression and encouragement of feminine feeling. Composed in the mixed tragicomic form that violated neo-classical standards but was popular in the late 17th century, the play was originally presented as an entertainment to suit all moods.

Aphra Behn was a significant influence on 18th-century literature and theatre. As the author of one of the most popular Restoration comedies, she was influential in British theatre, and as the originator of the powerful Oroonoko myth, she had a much wider-reaching impact. In part that impact must be attributed to her deliberate emphasis on ‘my Masculine Part the Poet in me’. Taking on a masculine poetic tradition, she achieved her greatest fame with heroes, the comic Willmore and the tragic Oroonoko, rather than with heroines. Her refusal to be confined to feminine subjects or styles was crucial to her achievement. She entered, took part in, and made her distinct contribution to, traditions of writing that had been predominantly masculine; and she influenced the men, as well as the women, who followed her.