Who was Aphra Behn?
The personal history of Aphra Behn, the first Englishwoman to earn her livelihood by authorship, is unusually interesting but very difficult to unravel and relate. Information regarding Aphra Behn, especially her early life, is scanty, but she was almost certainly born in Wye, near Canterbury, on July 10, 1640 to Bartholomew Johnson, a barber, and Elizabeth Denham. Aphra’s parents were married in 1638 and Aphra, or Eaffry, was baptized on December 14, 1640. Elizabeth Denham was employed as a nurse to the wealthy Culpepper family, who lived locally, which means that it is likely that Aphra grew up with and spent time with the family’s children. The younger child, Thomas Culpepper, later described Aphra as his foster sister. Wye College Wye is an historic village in Kent, England, located some 12 miles from Canterbury. … Canterbury is a cathedral city in east Kent in South East England and is the seat of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Primate of All England, head of the Church of En
For nearly two hundred years after her death, she disappeared almost entirely from the pages of literature and of history itself. The facts of her birth, parentage and ancestry gradually grew into fiction. Behn spoke of her father, mother, sisters and brother in the autobiographical Oroonoko, but gave little information about them, except to say that her father had been appointed Lieutenant General of Surinam, a British colony on the coast of South America.
