SOURCE: "A Devil on't, the Woman Damns the Poet': Aphra Behn's Fictions of Feminine Identity," in Seductive Forms: Women's Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1992, pp. 69-113.

In the following excerpt, Ballaster explores the relationship between Behn's poetry and her opinions about gender roles.

Behn's best-known attempt at self definition is her vindication of herself as poet in the preface to a late play, The Lucky Chance (1687). Her writings on her writing, habitually triggered by the hostility of male 'wits', turn on the question of gender attribution. The preface to The Lucky Chance, a comedy of manners performed at the Theatre Royal in 1687, defines 'masculine' writing in two ways. The first definition refers solely to the question of content, and the double standard employed with regard to a woman playwright. Sexual explicitness is only permissible, she notes, for the male author. Addressing her female audience...