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writ come forth under any man’s name, and never known to have been mine; I appeal to all unbiased judges of sense if they had not said that person had made as good comedies, as 24
    any one man that has writ in our age; but a devil on’t the woman damns the poet . . . I value fame as much as if I had been born a hero.
    In fact, a play like The Rover is a cool, clear-eyed analysis of how women have to manoeuvre, negotiate – and inevitably compromise
    – in their dealings with men, who are portrayed, almost uniformly, as cold-hearted exploiters. Behn’s heroine Hellena – through a combination of luck, wit, shrewd calculation, and skill at role-playing – achieves respectability (though almost certainly not happiness) in marriage to the predatory Willmore. But there are hints that Behn may have sympathized most, and perhaps even identified, not with the (more or less) virtuous Hellena, but with the whore Angellica Bianca. As modern critics have pointed out, the Th
    heroine and her creator share the same initials. Angellica, ironically, e beginnin is at heart an idealist, and as such alone among a cast of cynics and manipulators. She believes her seducer’s fine romantic words, and g of secular feminism
    at the close of the play she is excluded, left bitter and disillusioned.
    Behn’s ending leaves us disconcerted, uncomfortable, questioning, for Behn’s sympathies, and ours, are undoubtedly with the hapless Angellica. In a postscript defending her play against charges of plagiarism (women were especially vulnerable to dismissive sneers about their ability), Behn admitted that though she might ‘have stoln some hints’ from an earlier work by Thomas Killigrew, ‘the Plot and Bus’ness (not to boast on’t ) is my own’. And she continued with an ambiguous statement that seems to confirm some kind of personal identification with her unhappy character: ‘I, vainly proud of my judgement, hang out the Sign of Angellica (the only stoln Object) to give Notice where a great part of the Wit dwelt.’
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    Chapter 3
    The 18th century:
    Amazons of the pen
    Mary Astell was one of the earliest true feminists, perhaps the first English writer to explore and assert ideas about women which we can still recognize and respond to. Throughout her life she identified with and spoke directly to other women, acknowledging their shared problems. Though she was deeply religious, she had little in common with her outspoken predecessors in the 17th-century sects. She was profoundly conservative; a life-long Royalist and a High Church Anglican, radical only in her perception of the way women’s lives were restricted by convention, and their minds left undeveloped and untrained.
    Astell was born in 1666. Her father, a Newcastle coal merchant, died when she was 12 years old. In her late teens, Astell fell into a deep depression, writing poems about her lonely misery, and the fact that, for all her intellectual self-confidence, she could not envisage any tolerable future for herself. At the age of 21, she wrote a poem complaining about her frustration (which must have been shared by many other girls) and gloomily admitting that she could imagine no life that would allow her to use her talents or satisfy her ambition.
    Nature permits not me the common way,
    By serving Court or State, to gain
    That so much valu’d trifle fame
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    She might, perhaps, have found satisfaction as a missionary: That to the Turk and Infidel
    I might the joyfull tydings tell
    And spare no labour to convert them all
    But ah my Sex denies me this . . .
    But a few months later, in what was surely an act of remarkable courage, she left home, setting out on the long and uncomfortable journey to London with only a little money, and the addresses of a few family contacts. She seems to have settled in Chelsea from the start, and would remain there for the rest of her life; she had some distant relatives there. But they were not very helpful, and she was soon depressed and