She enjoyed success as a clever playwright in the fiercely competitive world of the Restoration theater; and one of her novels,
Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave (1688), has long been regarded as a minor classic of English fiction.
Behn's life spanned the turbulent five decades preceding the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Her death has been recorded as occurring on 16 April 1689, but no one knows with any certainty where or when she was born, or to what parents. Her earliest biographer, the anonymous "One of the Fair Sex" whose memoir is prefixed to the collection The Histories and Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn (1696), claimed that Behn was born in 1640 in Canterbury, Kent, the daughter of a gentleman named John Johnson, who was closely related to Francis, Lord Willoughby, Royal Patentee for the West Indian colony at Surinam. Since Behn's friend and literary executor, Charles Gildon, is the likely author of this memoir, it may be accurate, at least for the most part. By this account, Lord Willoughby appointed his kinsman lieutenant-general of Surinam in 1663, but Johnson died at sea en route to his new post.
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