by Aphra Behn

Little is known about the enigmatic Aphra Behn other than the fact that she was the first Englishwoman to write professionally. She is believed to have been born Aphra Johnson in a small town near Canterbury, England, in July 1640. In the 1660s she may (as she claims in Oroonoko) have traveled to Surinam, a British plantation colony on the Atlantic coast of South America. Later in that same decade, she acted as a spy in the Netherlands on behalf of the newly restored King Charles II. Returning penniless to London and having failed to persuade the government to reimburse her for the money she had spent on gathering intelligence, she seems to have served some time in debtors’ prison. She began writing to pay her debts, in the end producing from...