Death in London

Aphra Behn died in London on 16 April 1689, likely worn down by illness, financial hardship, and the exhausting pace of decades of prolific literary production. Despite her extraordinary output — plays, poetry, prose fiction, and translations — she died in straitened circumstances, a common fate for professional writers of the era regardless of gender.

She was buried in the East Cloister of Westminster Abbey, an honor that, while not placing her among the nobility interred in the main abbey, nonetheless marked recognition of her literary stature at a time when few women writers received any public commemoration at all. Her gravestone bears an epitaph emphasizing her wit, reading in part that here lies proof that wit alone could not secure lasting protection against mortality.

Behn's death closed one of the most remarkable literary careers of the seventeenth century. In the decades and centuries following her death, her reputation fluctuated — sometimes celebrated, sometimes dismissed or moralized against due to the frank sexuality and political daring of her work — but she was never entirely forgotten. By the twentieth century, she would be reclaimed as a foundational figure in the history of women's professional writing, most famously by Virginia Woolf, who urged women to lay flowers on her tomb in gratitude for the freedoms Behn's example had helped secure for later generations of women authors.