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The personal history of Mrs. Behn, commonly called the first Englishwoman to earn her livelihood by authorship, has long been regarded as unusually interesting. The daughter of a barber named John Johnson, she was baptized at Wye, Kent, 10 July, 1640. She was buried in London, 20 April, 1689. We find that her career, as generally related, falls into three principal episodes. (1) With a relative whom in Oroonoko she calls her father, and who was appointed lieutenant-governor of Surinam, she went to that colony, where she met the royal slave who is the hero of her story, and where she remained until about 1658. (2) She married a London merchant of Dutch extraction, named Behn, but was widowed by 1666. (3) In the latter part of 1666, while acting as a political agent at Antwerp, she gained, through a Dutch lover of hers named Vander Albert, early information of the famous raid by De Ruyter on the English ships in the Thames and Medway; but her timely warning was ridiculed by the British government officials, and she retired from the secret service to devote herself to literature. Momentary doubts whether these data are not in some particulars inaccurate have occasionally been expressed during the last sixty years; but the suspicions, never very strong, have always quickly died away. The story as outlined above has been substantially accepted and retold, not only by the compilers of popular works of reference, but by scholars like Walter Raleigh, Richard Garnett, W. H. Hudson, H. S. Canby, and Miss C. E. Morgan, as well as by those who have made a special study of Mrs. Behn,—namely Edmund Gosse, P. Siegel, and E. A. Baker.
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