Status Updates From Aphra Behn: A Secret Life

For my own future refence, I'll round off with a brief map of what's in which chapter:

Let me with Sappho and Orinda be
Oh ever sacred Nymph, adorn'd by thee;
And give my Verses Immortality.

Well, that's that finished (from here on is just notes, bibliography and index). Though it'll take me some time to go back through and add some notes for the last 90 pages...

Bulstrode Whitelocke succinctly sums up Aphra's (ex-)boyfriend: "an Atheist, a Sodomite professed, a corruptor of youth, & a Blasphemer of Christ".
[he was also probably a murderer, but that wasn't controversial enough in those days to be worth mentioning]

"Custom is unkind to our Sex; not to allow us free choice, but we above all Creatures must be forced to endure the formal recommendations of a Parent; and the more insupportable Addresses of an Odious Foppe, whilst the Obedient Daughter stands - thus - with her Hands pinn'd before her, a set look, few words, and a mein that cries - 'come marry me - out upon't!'"

(from 'Sir Patient Fancy')

A neat encapsulation of the changing times: in 1637, George Wilkins published a dour and moral Jacobean tragedy, The Miseries of Inforst Marriage; in the late 1670s, Aphra adapted the play, but this time as a farcical comedy, The Town-Fopp, complete with an accidential-lesbianism subplot...