Professor Elaine Hobby: The first professional woman writer in English: Aphra Johnson (Behn) from Harbledown

Sunday 30 April, 12 - 1pm, OS.0.01, Michael Berry lecture theatre, Old Sessions House

The first professional woman writer in English was from Canterbury. Born in Harbledown in 1640, under her married surname of Behn she had a spectacular career on the London stage in the 1670s and 80s, and wrote ground-breaking fiction and poetry, too. This talk will explore the startling insights she gives us into the emotional and sexual world of Stuart England. It will also follow her to the other worlds she explored, including Virginia, the west coast of Africa, and the moon.

Elaine Hobby is Professor Emerita of 17th-Century Studies at Loughborough University. Today her primary research topic is the AHRC-funded project ‘Editing Aphra Behn in the Digital Age’. Leading a team of international scholars, one of the project’s outputs will be the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Aphra Behn that will place Behn as not only Britain’s first professional woman playwright, but also mark her importance as poet, fiction-writer, and translator from French.

Tickets

Tickets are £10 per event. If you are booking 10 or more tickets of any given type (e.g. 10 tickets to one lecture, or 1 ticket to 10 lectures) within a single transaction, then a discount of £2 per ticket will be applied at the checkout, and you will only pay £8 per ticket.

Student discounts

There are a limited number of £2 student tickets available for each talk; these are not available for the tours. To access this discount, please use discount code TUDORSTUD23 when prompted. Please note that student ID must be presented with student tickets on the door of the events.