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  • "Why I Write Them, I Can Give No Account":Aphra Behn and "Love-Letters to a Gentleman" (1696)
  • Claudine van Hensbergen

England's first female professional writer, Aphra Behn (1640-89), presents problems for those seeking to establish her biography. Despite her contemporary success and popularity, there is, in Behn's case, very little to go on. Behn's manuscript hand survives in only a small number of documents. These include a letter to the publisher Jacob Tonson requesting an advance for a commissioned volume of verse, a presentation copy of her elegy on the death of Edmund Waller, a letter to Waller's daughter, Abigail, and a clutch of state letters documenting Behn's spying activities on the Continent.1 Also of note is a commonplace book, Astrea's Book of Songs and Satyrs, housed in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, containing Behn's manuscript hand.2 There are, however, other sources available to the Behn biographer, most notably a small number of letters printed after Behn's death that do not survive in manuscript.3 The most significant of these is a cache of eight letters entitled "Love-Letters by Mrs. A. Behn," first published in a posthumous volume, The Histories and Novels of the Late Ingenious Mrs. Behn (1696).4 These letters, printed seven years after Behn's death, are addressed to "Lycidas" and signed "Astrea," the latter name being the well-established pseudonym Behn first employed when she worked as a spy for Charles II in [End Page 65] 1666. The letters are intimate and appear to offer a rare insight into Behn's character and situation at some unidentified point during her romantic entanglement with John Hoyle, the libertine lawyer purported to be the "Lycidas" to whom the letters are addressed. The title page of Histories and Novels advertises the letters as "Never before Printed," implying the unique and revelatory nature of their content (figure 1). This implication is consistent with the tone of the letters themselves:

I had rather, dear Lycidas, set my self to write to any Man on Earth than you; for I fear your severe Prudence and Discretion, so nice, may make an ill Judgment of what I say: Yet you bid me not dissemble; and you need not have caution'd me, who so naturally hate those little Arts of my Sex, that I often run on freedoms that may well enough bear a Censure from people so scrupulous as Lycidas. Nor dare I follow all my Inclination neither, nor tell all the little Secrets of my Soul: Why I write them, I can give no account; 'tis but fooling my self, perhaps, into an Undoing. (letter 4)

The extract above indicates the intimate tone of the letters as a whole, yet it also encapsulates those notions this article engages with: the potentially dissembling nature of the letters as a biographical text, and the question of whom it may be that they are, ultimately, "fooling . . . into an Undoing."

Janet Todd registers an important distinction between letters of the Restoration and those of the eighteenth century, remarking that in the earlier period printed "letters are not embodiments of subjectivity and records of authentic emotion" as they would come to be understood in the eighteenth century, but rather "ambiguous, manipulative, and opportunistic."5 In this article, I consider the ways in which "Love-Letters" conforms to Todd's reading of Restoration epistolary discourse, and the ways that it exploits both Aphra Behn and readerly expectations. To do this, I discuss the two earliest extant editions of Histories and Novels: the first edition of 1696, and the third edition of 1698 (figure 2).6

Accepting "Love-Letters"

In their biographies of Behn, Maureen Duffy and Janet Todd utilize "Love-Letters" to reconstruct Behn's life for the modern reader.7 Both critics nod to the possibility that the letters may be fictitious, yet neither lingers long upon the further implications of question of authorship; they are employed, after all, in writing a work of biography, not bibliography. I intend, likewise, [End Page 66]


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Figure 1.

Aphra Behn, Histories and Novels (1696), title page, British Library, C.57...

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