Rereading Aphra Behn

Ever since Virginia Woolf proclaimed that all women writers should place flowers on her grave, Aphra Behn has slowly become recognized as the first Englishwoman to earn her living by writing. In this first book-length critical work on Aphra Behn, a range of contributors explore the ways in which Behn is now entering the canon of English literature and examine the significance of her writing in the contexts of both seventeenth-century English literature and contemporary debates in critical feminist theory.

Heidi Hutner is the author of "Aphra Behn's Oroonoko: The Politics of Gender, Race, and Class" in Dale Spender's Early Women Writers: Living by the Pen (1992) and " Evelina and the Problem of the Female Grotesque" ( Genre 1990). She is currently completing her dissertation, entitled "Representing the 'Other' Woman: Colonial Discourse in Restoration Drama," at the University of Washington.