Jean-Paul Sartre] (1981). When

Behn's origins are uncertain, but recent evidence suggests that she was the Aphra Johnson christened in 1640 in Harbledown, Kent, although the yeoman status of her supposed father does not accord with her education, which is that of a gentlewoman. According to her novel Oronooko (1688), she traveled to Surinam in 1663-1664 when she was a young woman. Tradition has it that upon her return to London she married a merchant named Behn, of Dutch extraction, who perhaps died of the plague in 1665; however, she never once refers to such a person. The earliest indisputable external evidence about her life is a series of letters documenting her employment in 1666 as a secret agent for the English government. She was sent to Antwerp to get information about exiled Cromwellians and to relay Dutch military plans. She used Astrea as her code name as a spy and later as her literary name. In the Netherlands she ran into debt, and in 1667 when she returned home, went briefly to debtor's prison. She was noted among a wide circle of friends and fellow writers for her beauty, wit, and generosity; Sir Peter Lely and Mary Beale painted portraits of her. Her strong Tory sentiments and personal loyalty to the royal family led to a political outspokenness that earned her enemies among some powerful Whigs. She satirized the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Whig leader, in The City Heiress (1682) but offended the king in the same year when she attacked the Duke of Monmouth in an epilogue, for which she was arrested. During her life she was forced to fend off not only political and personal attacks but also attacks on her as a woman who wrote with the same freedoms as a man. In her last years she suffered from poverty and a painful crippling disease, and her political hopes were crushed by the Revolution of 1688.