Aphra Behn

Aphra Behn (1640–1689) was the first English woman to earn her living by writing. Little is certain about her early life; she may have visited Surinam and she spied for Charles II in Antwerp in 1666, for which she was never paid. From 1670 she wrote for the London stage, producing some twenty plays, among them The Rover, The Dutch Lover, The Roundheads and The Lucky Chance, witty comedies of intrigue with a Tory and royalist bent. Her short novel Oroonoko and her poems followed. She was buried in Westminster Abbey, and Virginia Woolf said all women together ought to let flowers fall upon her tomb.