SOURCE: “Confinement Sharpens the Invention: Aphra Behn's The Rover and Susanna Centlivre's The Busie Body,” in Look Who's Laughing: Gender and Comedy, edited by Gail Finney, Gordon and Breach, 1994, pp. 81-98.

In this essay, Kinney outlines similarities between Behn's and Centlivre's careers and examines a play by each writer in which “female experience, including the experience of female authorship, is dramatized.”

Aphra Behn's contribution to the history of literature is, by now, well known. In 1929, in her study of women and literature A Room of One's Own, Virginia Woolf marks Aphra Behn's career as a “very important corner on the road,” a turning point. With Behn, Woolf argues

We leave behind, shut up in their parks among their folios, those solitary great ladies who wrote without audience or criticism, for their own delight alone. We come to town and rub shoulders with ordinary people in the streets. Mrs...