Primary Contributors:

Emma Grummitt, with EMLO and the Cultures of Knowledge research project

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Aphra Behn (1640–1689)

Aphra Behn is best known for her illustrious career as a playwright, and is often labelled the first English woman to make a living from her pen. Despite this, little is known about her early life. It seems likely she travelled to Surinam in her twenties, possibly at the same time as her father, who died on his way there. After her return, Behn was employed in 1666 as a spy by Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, to perform an under-cover mission. Behn was to make contact with a man named William Scot (son of the executed regicide Thomas Scot), whom it is thought she had met while in Surinam and who was connected with the anti-royalist expatriate community in the United Provinces. Behn was sent with a set of questions for Scot, and one clear aim: to convince him to act as a double agent for the English. The letters that survive from that year offer insight into this sensational episode of Behn’s early life and detail her time spent as a spy between July and December 1666.

Behn made contact with Scot and began to send his reports of intelligence back to her handlers in England. However, despite Behn’s best efforts, her correspondence, as well as her pleas for money, was routinely ignored by operatives back in England. Eventually, she was forced to leave the country and seek a living back in England. Four years after her return she wrote her first play, The Forc’d Marriage, which set her on a trajectory to the literary success she is best remembered for today.

The letters themselves are of particular value as so few records survive from Behn’s early life. Moreover, the particulars of their composition give the reader insights into her later literary career. Behn was sent with a simple, numeric cipher together with clear instructions. However, she clearly felt the need to employ certain artistic licenses, both in the creation of her own cipher, and in the way she edited Scot’s intelligence. Although Arlington and his men were clearly not drawn in by Behn’s engaging espionage narratives, these letters have interesting implications, especially when read in conjunction with her literary success later in life.

Partners and Additional Contributors

This ‘starter catalogue’ was proposed by Emma Grummitt during a practical placement working at Early Modern Letters Online [EMLO], which was facilitated by the MSc in Digital Scholarship at the University of Oxford, and created subsequently when Emma worked with Cultures of Knowledge as an EMLO Digital Fellow.

Key Bibliographic Source(s)

W. J. Cameron, New Light on Aphra Behn: An Investigation into the Facts and Fictions Surrounding Her Journey to Surinam in 1663 and Her Activities as a Spy in Flanders in 1666 (Auckland: University of Auckland Press, 1961).

Contents

This catalogue includes eighteen letters. The majority of the correspondence recorded is authored by Behn and sent to operatives back in England including James Halsall, Thomas Killigrew, and Henry Bennet (Lord Arlington). We do not know the contents of the replies Behn received, as they do not appear to have been preserved, although the contents of Behn’s letters suggest that communication from England was infrequent.

The letters have two main themes: reporting on local affairs and asking for money. Any significant intelligence Behn provided appears to have been minimal. This is supported by later documents in the series, which record abstracts of her intelligence reports, demonstrating that her correspondence was not prioritized by operatives back in England.

Approximately half of the letters include ciphered elements. The use of cipher across the series is erratic and varies greatly in terms of frequency between letters. It is clear that Behn was sent with a simple numerical cipher that she deemed insufficient for her needs. As a result, she created her own bespoke cipher, comprising unique symbols for each letter of the alphabet, which she then used in conjunction with the numeric cipher throughout the latter half of the letter series.

The authorship and origins of the letters are also complicated. The intelligence reports are presented as transcripts of Scot’s originals; however, we do not know whether these letters ever existed. Behn tells her ‘reader’ that Scot is wary of sending his handwriting overseas; however, this is called into question by the fourth letter in the series. This letter answers the original set of questions sent by Behn’s handlers and is thought to be written in Scot’s own hand. As reports continued to be sent back and forth, the abstracts, which are copies of Behn’s letters, which are, in turn, supposedly copies of Scot’s, add to the trail of confusion. As a collection these letters are a fascinating example of Behn’s early forays into narrative manipulation through her use of cipher and transcription.

Provenance

This collection of letters in their original form is held by the National Archives in the State Papers collection. They are searchable in their Discovery catalogue and in Gale’s ‘State Papers Online’ collection, accessible via a subscribing institution.

The authoritative print transcription of the letters is in W. J. Cameron’s New Light on Aphra Behn: An Investigation into the Facts and Fictions Surrounding Her Journey to Surinam in 1663 and Her Activities as a Spy in Flanders in 1666 (1961). There is also a student digital edition hosted by the Bodleian website Taylor Editions that contains transcriptions and manuscript images for fourteen of the letters. For further details, please see the ‘Further Resources’ section below.

Further resources

Bibliography

Maureen Duffy, The Passionate Shepherdess (London: Methuen, 1989).

Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Behn (London: André Deutsch, 1996).

Behn’s Early Life and Period as a Spy

Nadine Akkerman, ‘Aphra Behn’s Letters from Antwerp, July 1666-April 1667: Intelligence Reports or Epistolary Fiction?’ in Invisible agents: Women and Espionage in Seventeenth-Century Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

Nadine Akkerman, ‘Enigmatic Cultures of Cryptography’ in James Daybell and Andrew Gordon, eds, Cultures of Correspondence in Early Modern Britain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), pp. 74–91.

Margaret Ferguson, ‘The Authorial Ciphers of Aphra Behn’ in Steven Zwicker, ed., The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1650–1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) pp. 225–49.

Harrison Gray Platt, Jr, ‘Astrea and Celadon: An Untouched Portrait of Aphra Behn’, PLMA, 49 (1934), pp. 554–69.

Janet Todd, ‘Fatal Fluency: Behn’s Fiction and the Restoration Letter’, Eighteenth-Century Fiction, 12 (2000). pp. 417–34.

Janet Todd and Francis McKee, ‘The Shee Spy: Unpublished Letters on Aphra Behn, Secret Agent’, Times Literary Supplement (London, September 1993) pp. 4–5.

JP Vander Motten and Rene Vermeir, ‘Reality, and Matter of Fact: The Text and Context in Aphra Behn’s “The Fair Jilt”’, The Review of English Studies, 66, (2015), pp. 280–99.

Further resoures

Discovery catalogue, The National Archives, Kew.

State Papers Online, 1509–1714 (Gale Cengage, available with a subscription or via a subscribing institution).

Launch Catalogue