SOURCE: "Success and Attack," in Reconstructing Aphra: A Social Biography of Aphra Behn, The Dial Press, 1980, pp. 207-35.

Here, Goreau traces the critical and popular reaction to some of Behn's works, focusing especially on the writer's criticism of the "property-marriage system" in her plays.

The staging of Aphra's tragedy Abdelazer in July 1676 marked the end of a three-year literary silence. No play had appeared under her name since the foundering of The Dutch Lover in 1673. Perhaps she was still smarting from the attacks launched against her on that occasion; or perhaps she was writing plays that were only to be staged later. A third possibility is that she was very much preoccupied by the initial intensity of her love affair with John Hoyle. The play Abdelazer opened with a song which was to become one of her most famous lyrics. It was called "Love Armed" and began thus...