Aphra Behn Stages the Social Scene in the Restoration Theatre By ...

The Fulsom Gingle of the Times,

Is all we are allow’d to Understand or Hear.¹

Witness Behn

Extraordinarily little is known of Aphra Behn’s life before she began to write for the stage. In her lifetime, she seems to have been remarkably reticent about her past, while at the same time having the reputation of being an extremely sociable, witty, and amusing companion, the friend of Dryden, Otway, Killigrew, and Rochester and their circle, but also known affectionately by more sober people like the Howard family, and churchmen like Sprat of the Royal Society, and Gilbert Burnet. Yet, strangely, we know very little about her as a person, and information about her life, even after she began to write plays, is scarce.

The History of the Life and Memoirs of Mrs Behn by one of the Fair Sex, which is included in his edition of her works published in 1696 (seven years after her death), is believed to have been written by Charles Gildon from hearsay, and is accepted only in part and then with caution.² It contains surprisingly sparse facts padded out with what is obviously romanticised guesswork and pure invention; but most later biographies were based substantially on this, for want of anything better, until 1977, when Maureen Duffy wrote The Passionate Shepherdess. This is still the most impartial biography. Duffy discusses the possible surroundings of Aphra Behn’s birth and concludes that her mother, a Mrs. Johnson, had been the wet nurse to the Culpeppers, a Kent family who had connections with several others such as the Killigrews and the Howards, and that Aphra Behn was the foster sister of Thomas Culpepper. Three years later in 1980, Angeline Goreau brought out a more feminist view of her in Reconstructing Aphra and suggests a slightly different possibility—that Aphra Behn was brought up by the Johnsons, but was the illegitimate daughter of a Lady Willoughby. Mary Ann O’Donnell gives the most detailed examination of her possible origins in The Cambridge Companion, summed up by Janet Todd in the latest biography. Todd thinks the balance of probabilities makes Behn the daughter of the wet nurse to the Culpepper family, who was married to a barber named Johnson.