Restoration-era author Aphra Behn (1640–89) is regarded as England's first professional female writer. Despite the considerable success of her poetry, plays, and fiction, little is known for certain about her life. Two centuries after her burial in Westminster Abbey's Poets Corner, Virginia Woolf observed, "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn … for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."
