SOURCE: Kinney, Suz-Anne. “Confinement Sharpens the Invention: Aphra Behn's The Rover and Susanna Centlivre's The Busie Body.” In Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy, edited by Gail Finney, pp. 81-98. Langhorne, Penn.: Gordon and Breach, 1994.

In the following essay, Kinney discusses Behn and Centlivre as feminist pioneers in the theater, observing several similarities in the two playwrights' approaches to female characters, but suggesting that Centlivre's plays may reflect the increased conservatism of the early eighteenth-century theater.

Aphra Behn's contribution to the history of literature is, by now, well known. In 1929, in her study of women and literature A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf marks Aphra Behn's career as a “very important corner on the road,” a turning point. With Behn, Woolf argues

We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight...