English—in the fourteenth century. Born in 1373, she was the daughter of the mayor of the town of Lynn in Norfolk, England. She married late for the times—at twenty—and got pregnant right away. While undergoing a wretchedly long and painful labor, she went mad and became violent, tearing at her own flesh, shrieking, having visions of devils, and screaming obscenities about her husband, her neighbors and friends, and herself. She claimed to be calmed down when Christ himself appeared to her in a vision, and indeed, she returned to her life as a wife and mother and bore thirteen more children.
Margery Kempe was profoundly changed, however, by her vision and decided to dedicate her life to Christian mysticism, as she continued to experience visitations and fits of weeping. She undertook a journey to the Holy Land, traveling alone from England across the continent to the Middle East. Her religious intentions meant nothing to those she met along the way; she was treated horribly and was called a whore and a heretic. She was jailed for her efforts and forced to defend herself with no help. Her recollections of the time depict a woman heeding a calling, torn between her love of Christ and her love for her family.
Despite all her tribulations, she managed to live a long life. Unable to write herself, she worked with hesitant scribes to compose her life story. Called The Book of Margery Kempe, this literary treasure was lost for nearly five hundred years. Thankfully, a copy was rediscovered in 1934, and Britain’s first autobiographical text is again telling the story of this extraordinary, ordinary housewife and mother.
And sometimes those that men think were revelations are deceit and illusions, and therefore it is not expedient to give readily credence to every stirring.
Margery Kempe
APHRA BEHN living by the pen
It is amazing that the name of Aphra Behn, England’s first professional woman writer, is not better known. While a handful of her contemporaries—Anne Finch, the Countess of Winchilea, and Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle—wrote for the entertainment of a small circle of friends, Aphra Behn was paid for her work and undertook it as her profession. Her circumstances were far different from those of such courtly ladies, as well. She was a widow of modest means and used her talent to survive.
Behn’s parentage is unclear. We know she was born in 1640 and traveled with her foster family to Surinam in the West Indies. Some biographers say she was involved in a slave rebellion in 1663. That same year, she and her family and fellow travelers were the first Europeans to visit a tribe of Indians in the West Indies. The following year, she returned to England and married a London merchant, Johan Behn, who died of the plague in 1665.
After the tragedy of her short-lived marriage, Aphra Behn needed an income and was fortunate to have an opportunity to enter King Charles II’s private force of spies. “Such public toils of state affairs [were] unusual with my sex or in my years,” she admitted. Behn was sent to Antwerp, where she proved to be a most able spy, but she did not receive her promised payment and was sent to a London debtor’s prison in 1668. While in jail, she determined never again to subject herself to anyone’s mercy and vowed to make her way independently and by her own wits.
She wrote her first play and saw it published partly because of the sheer novelty that she was a woman. The play, The Forced Marriage, was staged in London in 1670. From then on, Behn’s progress was rapid. Her career as a professional playwright established, she wrote and published fourteen plays encompassing many styles from farce to drama, including The Rover, Sir Patient Fancy, The City Heiress, and The Roundheads. She also began publishing poetry and comic verse. Always skirting the edge of controversy, she wrote some very sensual poems which shocked the readers of the day and prompted Anne Finch to comment, “a little too loosely she writ.” Criticism of her work fell consistently into one of two extremes of either wild praise or scorching criticism and often focused on her femaleness: the “body of a Venus and the mind of a Minerva,” the “English Sappho,” or cruelly, “that lewd harlot.”
Behn’s response was to carry on, pointing out that the great male writers of the day suffered no public shame for their openly erotic references. When the London theater fell on hard times after the glories of the Restoration, Behn turned her hand to writing prose fiction: Love Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister, published in 1684, followed by The Fair, Jilt, Agnes de Castro, and her opus, Oroonoko. Written in 1688, Oroonoko was loosely autobiographical, a retelling in a fictionalized version of her journey to Surinam as a young woman and her protest against slavery. This account is widely regarded as the first novel in English literature.
Sadly, a mere year after her triumph, she passed away, ill and impoverished. She continued to suffer denigration after her death by many who disapproved of her fiercely independent spirit. But Behn blazed the trail for every woman writer to come after her. Three hundred years later, Virginia Woolf penned this homage: “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.”
I’ll only say as I have touched before, that plays have no great room for that which is men’s great advantage over women.
Aphra Behn
LADY MARY CHUDLEIGH
A contemporary of Aphra Behn, Lady Mary Chudleigh wrote a verse response to British minister John Sprint, who in 1700 wrote The Bride-Woman’s Counselor, which instructed women to love, honor, and obey in no uncertain terms. Chudleigh wrote, in verse, a series including The Female Advocate; or A Plea for Just Liberty of the Tender Sex and notably Married Women and the Ladies Defense; or the Bride-Woman’s Counselor Answered. John Sprint was indeed resoundingly answered with Chudleigh’s beautifully wrought feminist rhetoric scorning the tacit rules that kept women “Debarred from knowledge, banished from the schools, And with the utmost industry bred fools,” entrapped in the “mean, low, trivial cares of life.” She exhorted women to “read and think, and think and read again.” Sadly, we know very little of her life except that she married Sir George Chudleigh and lost her children at very young ages. Her poems were crafted skillfully and with a keen intelligence and courageous idealism. Writing in 1700 and 1701, Lady Mary was well ahead of her time.
Wife and servant are the same, But only differ in the name.
Lady Mary Chudleigh, To the Ladies
CHRISTINE DE PISAN the first woman writer to be published in English
In the same way that, according to Virginia Woolf, English women writers are indebted to Aphra Behn, Italian women writers, including Nobel laureate Grazia Deledda, are indebted to Christine de Pisan. Three hundred years before Aphra Behn set pen to paper, de Pisan was earning her way as a writer.
Born in 1364, she was the daughter of a scientist and scholar, Thomas de Pisan, a Venetian court-appointed astrologer to the French king Charles V. Her girlhood saw a rare advantage for Christine: a classical education. She loved France and claimed it as her heart’s home. Her father saw to it that she was educated as well as any man, and Christine learned French, Latin, arithmetic, and geometry. She married Etienne du Castel, who was nine years her senior, at fifteen. In three short years they had three children, and du Castel died around the time of the third baby’s birth. At barely nineteen, Christine de Pisan was left to support her children and several hapless relatives, and did so with her talent for prose and poetry.
She claimed to write constantly, noting “in the short space of six years, between 1397 and 1403…fifteen important books, without mentioning minor essays, which, compiled, make seventy large copy-books.” Among her books are a biography of Charles V, another on Philip of Burgundy,
