Find Out More About Aphra
Want to find out more about Aphra Behn? Here're some excellent resources that you'll find useful.
Melvynn Bragg hosts another excellent edition of In Our Time, throwing more light on the life and world of Aphra Behn.
Janet Todd’s incredible biography, Aphra: A Secret Life, which has been revised since its initial publication, is a scholarly tour de force.
The New Ideas thread of the Arts & Ideas podcast, hosted by John Gallagher, takes his guests on a tour of the archives and documents that evidence the world of Aphra Behn.
Nadine Akkerman’s excellent book, Invisible Agents, exposes women in the world of seventeenth-century espionage, including our Aphra.
The excellent 2016 Royal Shakespeare Company production of The Rover was accompanied by some excellent resources and photographs. See the plot of The Rover explained here by actor Joseph Millson.
Of course, you have to read Behn’s work yourself too. The Methuen edition Behn: Five Plays contains the two most performed works (The Rover & The Lucky Chance) and also The Widow Ranter which is receiving more academic interest as the first play to be set in North America.
Behn’s poetry, for centuries passed over as little more than drollery, is now experiencing a critical revival.
Any interest in Aphra Behn would be incomplete without reading Oroonoko. This is one of the earliest English novels and exposes the cruelties of slavery, long before many others turned the pen (or politics) to doing the same.
Our supporter, Rebecca Rideal has written 1666: Plague, War and Hellfire - a fact-packed, fun romp around the world of 1665-1666, some of the most troubling years in all of British history – and there’s Aphra, right in the middle of it all!
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