Inspirational lives function to urge on other people to do great things. Sometimes inspirational people make a mark on history and sometimes they make an impression only on the lives of those immediately around them. More often than not, as the generations move on, we start to forget those who inspired earlier generations. Here's the story of how I met an inspirational person what during a short lunch-time detour which brought me face-to-face with someone we could all do with remembering.
If you should happen to find yourself in the vicinity of London's Westminster Abbey as I did one mid-week day a couple of years ago, take a short 15 minute detour into the Abbey cloisters (these being about the only part of the Abbey that can be visited without paying an entrance fee), stroll round the cloisters (a highly recommended diversion from a busy day) and keep your eyes on the tombstones on which you find yourself walking.
Why should you do this? Because then you will noticed something that caught my eye that I'd not seen before. This something brought out something you don't hear in churches very often, a fairly loud chuckle.
What was it that caused so much delight? A gravestone with the name 'Mrs Aphra Behr' and an inscription saying simply: "Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be Defence enough against Mortality". Lovely! So who was she, this person whose last resting place gave so much pleasure to me? An amazing woman, that's who.
Aphra Behn spied professionally for England with the code-named of Astrea, otherwise known as Agent 160. After her spying exploits, she went on the beome the first professional female writer in England. ,During the first twenty years of her career, she was also the country's only female playwright. Rumored abounded that she was King James II's mistress.
Very little else is known about her life partly because, as a period, the Restoration was badly documented and partly because the institutions that did keep records, such as the Universities of Cambridge and Oxford, and the legal institutions of the Inns of Court and the Middle Temple excluded women from their ranks. As a result, in order to understanding Aphra Behn's life we have to depend on her writings, on the voices of her characters and the repeated themes and expressions.
Perhaps through her espionage activities, Aphra Behn was fascinated with the twin and related pheonomena of sex and power in both the political and the personal spheres. At the time (and for a while afterwards) these topics were considered inappropriate subjects for women to be concerned with and, as a result, she was for many years after her death regarded simply as a smutty writer. A not uncommon view was that expressed by the Marquis of Halifax when he blamed Behn for the oppression of other women, remarking, "The unjustifiable freedom of some of your sex have involved the rest in the penalty of being reduced."
More recently, however, Aphra Behn has been rediscovered. Her plays are read widely and are regarded as subtle explorations of gender, race and class rather than as smut. Virginia Woolf can provide an appropriate conclusion to this short reflection. She said that: "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." '