'All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn'

[douqi]

In university I took a course on twentieth century women's literature in English. One of the books we read for that was Virginia Woolf's A Room of Her Own. In it, as part of constructing a critical historical account of women's writing in England, Woolf discusses the Restoration era writer Aphra Behn, one of the first women to earn her living by writing professionally.

At the time, our lecturer gave us a brief autobiographical sketch of Aphra Behn to contextualise the reference. What he did not tell us was that she wrote at least one genderfucked lesbian poem. Or that she may have been bi. I had to discover that for myself at my current great age. Thanks, Malaysian higher education.

Comments

[skuzzybunny]

Amazing find- i enjoyed reading through the poem, i know not much about either of them besides the one or two Woolf books I have read but for whatever reason (possibly 3rd hand socmed ramblings) I assumed inconsequentially there was something 🌈 there. Glad to see more explicit links

[douqi]

There is a surprising (at least to me initially) amount of lesbianism in early modern stuff, and (obviously less surprisingly) in modernist stuff (a female doctor even wrote RPF of theLadies of Llangollen, which has been recently reprinted in a nice bright pink volume). It's less prominent in Victorian literature (I think — still have a lot of reading to do), but lesbians do still show up here and there, and there's even a Welsh novel with a lesbian main character.