Aphra Behn’s (Non)Canonicity as a Restoration Playwright

Abstract

Aphra Behn was a very popular and successful Restoration dramatist, very prolific and second only to Dryden in the production of plays. This does not mean that she was exempt from hard criticisms on the part of some members of the literary world, which has, no doubt, influenced the reception of her work in later centuries. In fact, she disappeared from the literary canon from the eighteenth century onwards only to be rediscovered in the twentieth century, thanks especially to feminist criticism. In this paper, we have selected and analysed fragments from some of the prefaces, prologues and letters to readers that she wrote, which confirm that, having been part of the canon of the Restoration, she was left out just for the fact of being a woman.