A Writer for Pay

Abstract In an oft-cited passage Galesia, asked whether she prefers Philips or Behn, replies with “blunt Indignation” that “they ought not to be nam”d together” (PWS rn8). This emphatic repudiation is usually read as an effort on Barker’s part to dissociate herself from Aphra Behn or, more precisely, to dodge the ill-repute that pursued the scandalous Behn after her death and indeed into our own century. I Perhaps this is so. But to stress the distance between these two writers is to risk obscuring the extent to which Barker, by the end of her writing life, had come to embrace an authorial identity suggestive less of Orinda’s genteel amateurism than of Behn’s market-place professionalism.