Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn (1640–1689),  playwright, poet, prose writer and spy from the Restoration period.  Details of her early life are obscure. She was married briefly to a merchant named Behn. Later she came to the attention of Charles II, who employed her as a spy in Antwerp. On her return, she was briefly imprisoned for debt and began writing,  becoming the first woman to earn her living as a professional writer. Her early works were tragi-comedies in verse, but later she wrote more light-hearted comedies, notably The Rover. She wrote 19 plays in total and also  a short novel, Oroonoko (1688) about an enslaved African prince. A supporter of the Stuarts, she wrote a poem welcoming William III as new king.

The statue shows Aphra Behn at the age she left Canterbury, before her achievements in life.  Allusions to her future life surround her figure.  She insisted on always having the means to write at hand, so  a quill and ink container hang from her waist. In her purse she carries sheets of paper and  the ingredients to make ink. She holds a book in her right hand, which represents her published poems and plays, but in particular Oroonoko, which she had hoped would ‘live on well after I die’. This became  important for its description of the horrors of slavery. Behind her back she holds a theatre mask, to represent her importance as a playwright. Behn’s role as a spy is represented by a secret scroll which protrudes from her sleeve and she is portrayed turning slightly to check whether anyone is taking her message. Blown against the back of her skirts is a quotation from  Virgina Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own, which  proclaims ‘All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds’.

Location: Outside The Beaney House of Art and Knowledge, 18 High Street, Canterbury, Kent.