Aphra Behn Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Catherine Gallagher

Critical Essay by Catherine Gallagher

SOURCE: "Who Was that Masked Woman? The Prostitute and the Playwright in the Comedies of Aphra Behn," in Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol 15, No. 1-3, 1988, pp. 23-42.

Here, Gallagher focuses on The Lucky Chance, exploring how Behn "created a persona that skillfully intertwined the age's available discourses concerning women, property, selfhood and authorship."

Everyone knows that Aphra Behn, England's first professional female author, was a colosal and enduring embarrassment to the generations of women who followed her into the literary marketplace. An ancestress whose name had to be lived down rather than lived up to, Aphra Behn seemed, in Virginia Woolf's metaphor, to obstruct the very passageway to the profession of letters she had herself opened. Woolf explains in A Room of One's Own, "Now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I...
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