Aphra Behn: A Secret Life by Todd, Janet

493 in stock

228mm x 152mm x 31mm

Pages: 608

The life, work and history of Aphra Behn: seventeenth century dramatist, poet of the erotic and bisexual, novelist, political propagandist, spy.
Praise for the first hardback edition:
-ôFascinating scholarship. Todd conveys Behn's vivacious character and the mores of the time.' :the New York Times
-ôGround-breaking:it reads quickly and lightly. Even Todd's throwaway lines are steeped in learning and observation.' :Ruth Perry, MIT, Women's Review of Books
-ôA major biography; of interest to everyone who cares about women as writers.' :Times Higher Education Supplement
-ôFascinating, a page-turner and a delight, an astonishingly thorough book.' :Emma Donoghue
-ôAll women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn. . . . For it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.' :Virginia Woolf
Aphra Behn, a spy in the Netherlands and the Americas, was the first professional woman writer. The most prolific dramatist of her age, innovative novelist, translator, lyrical and erotic poet, she expresses a frank sexuality addressing impotence, orgasm and bisexuality, whilst serving as political propagandist for the monarch.
This revised biography of the extraordinary, ground-breaking writer, who is emblematic of the Restoration period, a time of masks and self-fashioning, is set in conflict-ridden England, Europe, and in the mismanaged slave colonies, following the Puritan republic in 1660.
Janet Todd, novelist and internationally renowned scholar, was President of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and a Professor at Rutgers, NJ. An expert on women's writing and feminism, she has published on many writers, including Jane Austen, the Shelley Circle, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Aphra Behn.