During the turbulent political times of the Exclusion Crisis, she wrote an epilogue and prologue that brought her legal trouble; she thereafter devoted most of her writing to prose genres and translations.

A staunch supporter of the Stuart line, Behn declined an invitation from Bishop Burnet to write a welcoming poem to the new king William III.

[3] She is remembered in Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own: "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn which is, most scandalously but rather appropriately, in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.

[8][9] Colonel Thomas Colepeper, the only person who claimed to have known her as a child, wrote in Adversaria that she was born at "Sturry or Canterbury"[b] to a Mr Johnson and that she had a sister named Frances.

[3] Although not much is known about her early childhood, one of her biographers, Janet Todd, believes that the common religious upbringing at the time could have heavily influenced much of her work.

Aphra was not alone in her quest of self-tuition during this time period, and there are other notable women, such as the first female medical doctor Dorothea Leporin who made efforts to self-educate.

One version of Behn's story has her travelling with a Bartholomew Johnson to the small English colony of Surinam (later captured by the Dutch).

[8][14] During this trip Behn said she met an African slave leader, whose story formed the basis for one of her most famous works, Oroonoko.

[2] Also, later in her career when she found herself facing financial troubles in the Netherlands, her mother is said to have had audience with the King in an attempt to secure Aphra's way home, implying there may have been some form of connection with aristocracy, however small.

She once commented that she was "designed for a nun," and the fact that she had so many Catholic connections, such as Henry Neville who was later arrested for his Catholicism, would have aroused suspicions during the anti-Catholic fervour of the 1680s.

[16] She was a monarchist, and her sympathy for the Stuarts, and particularly for the Catholic Duke of York may be demonstrated by her dedication of her play The Second Part of the Rover to him after he had been exiled for the second time.

She has also been placed in Westminster, in lodgings close to Sir Philip Howard of Naworth, and that it was his connections to John Halsall and Duke Ablemarle that led to her eventual mission in the Netherlands.

[2] The Second Anglo-Dutch War had broken out between England and the Netherlands in 1665, and she was recruited as a political spy in Antwerp on behalf of King Charles II, possibly under the auspices of courtier Thomas Killigrew.

When in 1673 the Dorset Garden Theatre staged The Dutch Lover, critics sabotaged the play on the grounds that the author was a woman.

Mass hysteria commenced as in 1678 the rumoured Popish Plot suggested the King should be replaced with his Roman Catholic brother James.

Political parties developed, the Whigs wanted to exclude James, while the Tories did not believe succession should be altered in any way.

[citation needed] Behn often used her writings to attack the parliamentary Whigs claiming, "In public spirits call’d, good o' th' Commonwealth...

In her last four years, Behn's health began to fail, beset by poverty and debt, but she continued to write ferociously, though it became increasingly hard for her to hold a pen.

[29] She published five prose works under her own name: La Montre: or, the Lover's Watch (1686), The Fair Jilt (1688), Oroonoko: or, The Royal Slave (1688), The History of the Nun (1689) and The Lucky Mistake (1689).

It is the story of the enslaved Oroonoko and his love Imoinda, possibly based on Behn's travel to Surinam twenty years earlier.

In the 18th century her literary work was scandalised as lewd by Thomas Brown, William Wycherley, Richard Steele and John Duncombe.

Alexander Pope penned the famous lines "The stage how loosely does Astrea tread, Who fairly puts all characters to bed!".

In the 19th century Mary Hays, Matilda Betham, Alexander Dyce, Jane Williams and Julia Kavanagh decided that Behn's writings were unfit to read, because they were corrupt and deplorable.

[39] The life and times of Behn were recounted by a long line of biographers, among them Dyce, Edmund Gosse, Ernest Bernbaum, Montague Summers, Vita Sackville-West, Virginia Woolf, George Woodcock, William J. Cameron and Frederick Link.

Behn was rediscovered as a significant female writer by Maureen Duffy, Angeline Goreau, Ruth Perry, Hilda Lee Smith, Moira Ferguson, Jane Spencer, Dale Spender, Elaine Hobby and Janet Todd.

A feminist critique tends to focus on Behn's inclusion of female pleasure and sexuality in her poetry, which was a radical concept at the time she was writing.

[23] Critics Lisa Zeitz and Peter Thoms contend that the poem "playfully and wittily questions conventional gender roles and the structures of oppression which they support".

[45] Virginia Woolf wrote, in A Room of One's Own: All women together, ought to let flowers fall upon the grave of Aphra Behn... for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds... Behn proved that money could be made by writing at the sacrifice, perhaps, of certain agreeable qualities; and so by degrees writing became not merely a sign of folly and a distracted mind but was of practical importance.

[65][66] Behn appears as a character in Daniel O'Mahony's Newtons Sleep, in Philip José Farmer's The Magic Labyrinth and Gods of Riverworld, in Molly Brown's Invitation to a Funeral (1999), in Susanna Gregory’s "Blood On The Strand", and in Diana Norman's The Vizard Mask.

[67] The 2019 Big Finish Short Trip audio play The Astrea Conspiracy features Behn alongside The Doctor, voiced by actress Neve McIntosh.