SOURCE: "Three Self-Portraits: Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley, Jane Barker," in The Rise of the Woman Novelist from Aphra Behn to Jane Austen, Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. 41-74.

Duffy on the neglect of Behn:

Literary survival is largely a matter of fashion and chance. No greater gods preside over it and we deceive ourselves if we think they do, that we have a just appraisal of what is excellent and worth preserving from the millions of words ever written. The work of a single writer, of a school or of a whole era can be dismissed to the dustheap where broken reputations lie about like discarded toys. If anyone disputes this I should remind him of just one instance: the resurrection job T.S. Eliot and others had to do on the metaphysicals, and in particular on one of the greatest of English writers, John Donne, earlier this century.

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