ABSTRACT
TODD’s 1989 study derives its very title from the self-advertisement of the prostitute Angellica Bianca in Behn’s 1677 play The Rover. Such a title thereby unequivocally places Behn at the core of this work, which investigates the emergence of English women writers in the late seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries. Having provided a thorough and readable historical context for her study, Todd devotes her fourth chapter, “An Honour and Glory to Our Sex”, to an assessment of Behn’s work. Todd evaluates Behn’s creativity from a resolutely historicist perspective, locating her firmly within the peculiar socio-political circumstances of the period. She argues that Behn, in her prose writing, develops a complex narrative voice which speaks as eye-witness or participant, thus almost becoming a character in its own right, while simultaneously resisting an absolute, and “masculine”, authoritativeness. What the ensuing combination of fact and fiction, reportage and invention, can lead to, Todd avers, is a “common lack of moral placing that shocks a modern reader. People perpetrate the most frightful crimes without necessarily being the worse for them”. Further, she highlights Behn’s sometimes unconventional approach to sexuality and heroism thus: “brutality crashes through Arcadia and yawns interrupt romance”. The concluding pages of Todd’s chapter on Behn concentrate on her Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister. Overall, Todd’s work on Behn is fresh and original, typified by detailed and yet never tedious research.
