Search Results for: aphra-behn-a-secret-life

Biography & Autobiography Posted on

Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

Author: Janet Todd

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

ISBN: 1448216958

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 608

View: 3351

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'Fascinating scholarship. Todd conveys Behn's vivacious character and the mores of the time' New York Times 'All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn; for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds,' said Virginia Woolf. Yet that tomb, in Westminster Abbey, records one of the few uncontested facts about this Restoration playwright, poet of the erotic and bisexual, political propagandist, novelist and spy: the date of her death, 16 April 1689. For the rest secrecy and duplicity are almost the key to her life. She loved codes, making and breaking them; writing her life becomes a decoding of a passionate but playful woman. In this revised biography, Janet Todd draws on documents she has rediscovered in the Dutch archives, and on Behn's own writings, to tell a story of court, diplomatic and sexual intrigue, and of the rise from humble origins of the first woman to earn her living as a professional writer. Aphra Behn's first notable employment was as a royal spy in Holland; she had probably also spied in Surinam. It was not until she was in her thirties that she published the first of the nineteen plays and other works which established her fame (though not riches) among her 'good, sweet, honey-candied readers'. Many of her works were openly erotic, indeed as frank as anything by her friends Wycherley and Rochester. Some also offered an inside view of court and political intrigues, and Todd reveals the historical scandals and legal cases behind some of Behn's most famous 'fictions'. Janet Todd, novelist and internationally renowned scholar, was president of Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, and a Professor at Rutgers, NJ. An expert on women's writing and feminism, she has written about many writers, including Jane Austen, the Shelley Circle, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Aphra Behn. 'Ground-breaking it reads quickly and lightly. Even Todd's throwaway lines are steeped in learning' Women's Review of Books 'A major biography; of interest to everyone who cares about women as writers' Times Higher Education Supplement
Literary Criticism Posted on

The Cambridge Companion to Aphra Behn

Author: Derek Hughes,Janet Todd

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9780521527200

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 248

View: 8738

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Traditionally known as the first professional woman writer in English, Aphra Behn has now emerged as one of the major figures of the Restoration. She provided more plays for the stage than any other author and greatly influenced the development of the novel with her ground-breaking fiction, especially Love-Letters between a Nobleman and his Sister and Oroonoko, the first English novel set in America. Behn's work straddles the genres: beside drama and fiction, she also excelled in poetry and she made several important translations from French libertine and scientific works. This Companion discusses and introduces her writings in all these fields and provides the critical tools with which to judge their aesthetic and historical importance. It also includes a full bibliography, a detailed chronology and a description of the known facts of her life. The Companion will be an essential tool for the study of this increasingly important writer and thinker.
Fiction Posted on

A Man of Genius

Author: Janet Todd

Publisher: Bitter Lemon Press

ISBN: 190852460X

Category: Fiction

Page: 352

View: 7814

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"Strange and haunting, a gothic novel with a modern consciousness." —Philippa Gregory "A haunting, sophisticated story about a woman discovering the truth about herself and the elusive, possibly illusive, nature of genius." —Sunday Times "Mesmerizing, haunting, imbued with a complete sense of historical verisimilitude" —Times Literary Supplement "A psychologically haunting and disturbing tale as full of mystery, exotic foreign places, and questions of parentage as any penned by her protagonist." —Library Journal "Thrilling and heartbreaking, a gothic novel with emotional heart and depth." —Foreword Reviews "A darkly mischievous novel about love, obsession and the burden of charisma, played out against the backdrop of Venice's watery, decadent glory." —Sarah Dunant "A mesmerizing story of love and obsession in nineteenth-century Venice: dark and utterly compelling." —Natasha Solomons Set in bustling Regency England and decaying Venice, A Man of Genius portrays a psychological journey from safety into secrecy and obsession. After a troubled childhood, Ann achieves independence earning her living as an author of Gothic novels. Within a group of male writers, she meets and is enthralled by the supposed poetic genius, Robert James. They become uneasy lovers. Ann and Robert travel from London through a Europe exhausted by the Napoleonic Wars. They arrive in a Venice of spies and intrigue, where their relationship becomes tortuous and Robert descends into near madness. Forced to flee with a stranger, Ann delves into her past to be jolted by a series of revelations about her lover, her parentage, the stranger, and herself.
Drama Posted on

The Rover

Author: Aphra Behn

Publisher: Charles River Editors via PublishDrive

ISBN: 1537806122

Category: Drama

Page: 266

View: 8155

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Aphra Behn was a British writer and poet from the Restoration era. Behn is noted for being one of the first English women to earn a living by writing and she would become the idol of many famous female authors who followed her. This edition of The Rover includes a table of contents.
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Radiation Diaries

Cancer, Memory and Fragments of a Life in Words

Author: Janet Todd

Publisher: N.A

ISBN: 9781909572171

Category:

Page: 208

View: 9603

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Exquisitely written diary of radiation treatment for pelvic cancers that delves into literary consciousness, feminism, memory and an unquiet past.
Fiction Posted on

Lady Susan Plays the Game

Author: Janet Todd

Publisher: A&C Black

ISBN: 1448213452

Category: Fiction

Page: N.A

View: 4377

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A must-read for any devotee of Jane Austen, Janet Todd's 'naughty-Austen' reimagining of the epistolary novel Lady Susan will capture your literary imagination and get your heart racing. Austen's only anti-heroine, Lady Susan, is a beautiful, charming widow who has found herself, after the death of her husband, in a position of financial instability and saddled with an unmarried, clumsy and over-sensitive daughter. Faced with the unpalatable prospect of having to spend her widowed life in the countryside, Lady Susan embarks on a serious of manipulative games to ensure she can stay in town with her first passion - the card tables. Scandal inevitably ensues as she negotiates the politics of her late husband's family, the identity of a mysterious benefactor and a passionate affair with a married man. Accurate and true to Jane Austen's style, as befits Todd's position as a leading Austen scholar, this second coming of Lady Susan is as shocking, manipulative and hilarious as when Jane Austen first imagined her.
Biography & Autobiography Posted on

Mary Wollstonecraft

A Revolutionary Life

Author: Janet Todd

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

ISBN: 1448213460

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: N.A

View: 5887

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The combination of Mary Wollstonecraft works, with her efforts to live a revolutionary inner and outer life has no equal. In her richly detailed, all-encompassing biography of the first major feminist in England, Mary Wollstonecraft, Janet Todd highlights her intellectual and sexual dilemmas, her glamorous and tumultuous life and loves. Since the first publication of Mary Wollstonecraft: A revolutionary Life in 2000, further historical evidence has been discovered – a letter to Count Bernsdorf in 1795 – and Janet Todd has revised this 2014 Bloomsbury Reader edition of her biography to reflect the new perspective this letter gives to some of the events.
Fiction Posted on

Invitation To A Funeral

Author: Molly Brown

Publisher: Macmillan

ISBN: 1466859784

Category: Fiction

Page: 288

View: 9799

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APHRA BEHN is an unusual woman by any standard, especially those of 1676 London. A popular playwright and former spy, she does not bow to convention, does not always have the fortitude to turn a charming, but alcoholic attorney from her bed, and currently, does not have the funds to pay the rent on her London home. But a long-shot bet--that the Earl of Rochester's doltish young mistress can improve her painfully poor acting enough to play the lead in Aphra's latest play--could have her in the clear again. Until she's indebted to pay for the funerals of two brothers whose kindness helped her years ago. And the debt goes further than that--both deaths smack of murder, and Aphra is determined to find a killer and uncover a deadly secret...one that could engage all of England in a bloody civil war. From the squalid streets of London to the grand chambers of Whitehall Palace, author Molly Brown vividly recreates Restoration England at its most uproarious, while crafting a brilliant novel of history, humor, and heart-pounding intrigue.
Biography & Autobiography Posted on

Death and the Maidens

Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley circle

Author: Janet Todd

Publisher: A&C Black

ISBN: 1448212529

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 336

View: 4549

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1816 was the fateful year when the Romantic poet Shelley and his lover Mary shared a hectic creative and sexual menage in Switzerland with Lord Byron. This intense period drew from the men some of the greatest poetry of the age; from Mary, it elicited the seminal figures of Frankenstein and his Creature. But for other women close to Shelley it was a time of tragedy. At the heart of the story are Fanny Wollstonecraft and Harriet Westbrook, women whose lives were literally overwhelmed by him ? and who both committed suicide before the year was out. "Not only a splendid work of feminist history, this is an important addition to late 18th- and early 19-century literary criticism." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Social Science Posted on

UN/MASKED

Memoirs of a Guerrilla Girl on Tour

Author: Donna Kaz

Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing, Inc.

ISBN: 1510709452

Category: Social Science

Page: 256

View: 8262

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An unknown actress on movie star’s arm was how she began. An anonymous activist in a rubber gorilla mask is where she wound up. UN/MASKED: Memoirs of a Guerrilla Girl On Tour follows the surprising twenty-five-year journey of a young artist, Donna Kaz, who is swept off her feet by Willliam Hurt, a rising star, and carried to a beach house in Malibu. The actor William Hurt introduces her to Hollywood’s elite by day and knocks her head in by night. When OJ Simpson kills his former wife in Brentwood, a bell goes off and awakens her angry, activist spirit. Always an outsider, she takes one step further into invisibility and becomes a Guerrilla Girl, a feminist activist who never appears in public without wearing a rubber gorilla mask and who uses the name of a dead woman artist instead of her own. As a Guerrilla Girl, Aphra Behn creates comedic art and theatre that blasts the blatant sexism of the theatre world while proving feminists are funny at the same time. These two narratives—that of a young victim of domestic violence at the hands of a successful actor and that of an artist so fed up with sexism in the theatre world that she puts on a gorilla mask and takes the name of a dead woman artist to provoke change—have been lived by one woman. Donna Kaz offers her compelling first-hand account—illuminated by twenty behind-the-scenes photographs—of her transition from a silent observer to an unapologetic activist. This is the memoir of a woman-turned-survivor-turned-radical-feminist who takes off her mask and, by merging her identities, reveals all.
History Posted on

The Passionate Shepherdess

The Life of Aphra Behn, 1640-1689

Author: Maureen Duffy

Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson

ISBN: 9781842121665

Category: History

Page: 336

View: 9062

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The barest facts of Aphra Behn's life are astonishing in themselves. Born in 1640 she had by her mid-twenties, travelled to South America, returned to England, been married and widowed. She was sent by Charles II to Antwerp as a spy, then on her return was imprisoned for debt. Once out of prison she chose to stay independent; and moved on to become one of the most successful dramatists of the Restoration theatre, author of one of the most popular novels of the period, Oroonoko, and a poet of such reputation that men at the time were moved to consider seriously the possibility of a 'female laureate'.Yet Aphra Behn's personal and literary achievements have suffered an eclipse unparalleled in literary history. Her lively wit and sexual candour provided an east target for the prudish scorn and criticism of late 17th-century England. She had asserted her position - second perhaps to Dryden - among 'the giants of wit and sense' in her age, as Defoe was to say later; but subsequent critics were to pass off her work as 'a reproach to her womanhood and a disgrace even to the licentious age in which she lived.'With scrupulous care Maureen Duffy has lifted the tarnished image of Aphra Behn from the muddle of sensational legend that has for too long obscured her true achievement - as an artist and as the pioneer who opened up the whole field of literature to women.
Drama Posted on

Aphra Behn Studies

Author: Janet Todd

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 9780521471695

Category: Drama

Page: 334

View: 617

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A study of Aphra Behn's drama, fiction, poetry and translation, as well as other aspects of her life, from her publishing struggles to her involvement in American slavery.
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Aphra Behn - The Amorous Prince

Love Ceases to Be a Pleasure When It Ceases to Be a Secret.

Author: Aphra Behn

Publisher: Stage Door

ISBN: 9781785431685

Category:

Page: 94

View: 7451

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Aphra Behn was a prolific and well established writer but facts about her remain scant and difficult to confirm. What can safely be said though is that Aphra Behn is now regarded as a key English playwright and a major figure in Restoration theatre. Aphra was born into the rising tensions to the English Civil War. Obviously a time of much division and difficulty as the King and Parliament, and their respective forces, came ever closer to conflict. There are claims she was a spy, that she travelled abroad, possibly as far as Surinam. By 1664 her marriage was over (though by death or separation is not known but presumably the former as it occurred in the year of their marriage) and she now used Mrs Behn as her professional name. Aphra now moved towards pursuing a more sustainable and substantial career and began work for the King's Company and the Duke's Company players as a scribe. Previously her only writing had been poetry but now she would become a playwright. Her first, "The Forc'd Marriage," was staged in 1670, followed by "The Amorous Prince" (1671). After her third play, "The Dutch Lover," Aphra had a three year lull in her writing career. Again it is speculated that she went travelling again, possibly once again as a spy. After this sojourn her writing moves towards comic works, which prove commercially more successful. Her most popular works included "The Rover" and "Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister" (1684-87). With her growing reputation Aphra became friends with many of the most notable writers of the day. This is The Age of Dryden and his literary dominance. From the mid 1680's Aphra's health began to decline. This was exacerbated by her continual state of debt and descent into poverty. Aphra Behn died on April 16th 1689, and is buried in the East Cloister of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on her tombstone reads: "Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be Defence enough against Mortality." She was quoted as stating that she had led a "life dedicated to pleasure and poetry."
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The Amorous Prince

Author: Aphra Behn

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

ISBN: 9781719136341

Category:

Page: 200

View: 9193

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The Amorous Prince The Curious Husband by Aphra Behn Set in Florence, and preoccupied with the collision of rampant sexuality and women's virtue, Behn's second play parodies the aristocratic attitudes of Charles II's court, comically exploring the effects of depravity and decadence in the highest echelons of society. The main plot concerns Prince Fredrick's erotic pursuits, chiefly with the sister (Cloris) and fiancée (Laura) of his best friend and courtier, Curtius. We are delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience. The Amorous Prince book The Amorous Prince ebook The Amorous Prince read The Amorous Prince text The Amorous Prince Aphra Behn
Biography & Autobiography Posted on

Jane Austen

Her Life, Her Times, Her Novels

Author: Janet Todd

Publisher: Andre Deutsch Limited

ISBN: 9780233003702

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 112

View: 4425

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Over the last 200 years, the novels of Jane Austen have been loved and celebrated across a diverse international readership. As a result, there is a bottomless appetite for detail about the woman behind the writing. Jane Austen traces her life and times; her relationships with family and friends; the attitudes and customs of the time that shaped her and were in turn shaped by her work; and the places where she lived, worked and set her novels, from rural Hampshire to fashionable Bath Spa. Chapters on each of her novels run throughout the book and place them in the context of her life. For such a renowned novelist, there is remarkably little direct material available, but this volume draws on archives for a truly insightful view.
Young Adult Fiction Posted on

Death by Bikini

Author: Linda Gerber

Publisher: Penguin

ISBN: 9781440630958

Category: Young Adult Fiction

Page: 240

View: 2548

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A fun, sexy, murder-mystery romance for all teen sleuths! Aphra Behn Connolly has the type of life most teenage girls envy. She lives on a remote tropical island and spends most of her time eavesdropping on the rich and famous. The problem is that her family?s resort allows few opportunities for her to make friends?much less to meet cute boys. So when a smoldering Seth Mulo arrives with his parents, she?s immediately drawn to him. Sure, he?s a little bit guarded, and sure his parents are rather cold, and okay he won?t say a word about his past, but their chemistry is undeniable. Then a famous rock star?s girlfriend turns up dead on the beach?strangled by her own bikini top?and alarm bells sound. Is it too great a coincidence that Seth?s family turned up just one day before a murder? As the plot thickens, Aphra finds that danger lurks behind even the most unexpected of faces. . . . From the Paperback edition.
Fiction Posted on

Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave

Author: Aphra Behn

Publisher: Booklassic

ISBN: 9635238878

Category: Fiction

Page: 58

View: 5070

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Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave was written in the year 1688 by Aphra Behn. This book is one of the most popular novels of Aphra Behn, and has been translated into several other languages around the world. This book is published by Booklassic which brings young readers closer to classic literature globally.
Literary Criticism Posted on

The Sign of Angellica

Women, Writing, and Fiction, 1660-1800

Author: Janet Todd

Publisher: Columbia University Press

ISBN: 9780231071352

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 328

View: 3756

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Describes the entry of women into literature as a profession. Looks at over a century of women's writings, from Behn to mary Wollstonecraft.
English drama Posted on

Female Playwrights of the Restoration

Five Comedies

Author: Paddy Lyons,Fidelis Morgan

Publisher: Everymans Library

ISBN: 9780460874274

Category: English drama

Page: 363

View: 7916

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Aphra Behn was the first woman to earn her living by writing for the theater, and was ranked by Defoe alongside Rochester and Milton as one of the 'great wits' of her century.