Acts of Oblivion: Aphra Behn and the legacy of the Civil Wars

Aphra Behn was born during the years of the Civil Wars (1642-51). Its battles and the social upheaval rent in the wake of the parliamentarian triumph marked the early years of her life. How the events of the Wars were remembered, memorialised, and strategically forgotten—by people and institutions alike—cast a long shadow over Behn’s writing life and political thought, shaping her views on sovereignty, her royalism, and her approach to the series of political crises that punctuated the 1670s and 1680s—her most productive period as a writer. Beginning with The Young King (1679), written when Behn was an agent in Surinam, this paper canvasses Behn’s response to the Civil Wars across her poetry, plays, and prose fiction. With particular focus on her political odes, The Feign'd Curtizans (1679),The Rover (1677, 1681) and Love-Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister  (1684-7), it traces how Behn transmutes the broader political cruxes of the Civil Wars—questions of divine right and power of the collective—into studies of power in love and desire, often seeking recourse to pastoral and allegory to veil, however loosely, her continual return to the nation’s recent trauma. The paper concludes by suggesting that in this body of works Behn offers literary culture as a means to rewrite the public history of the Civil Wars, a revisionism that achieves its most pronounced expression in The Roundheads (1682).