Aphra Behn (née Johnson) (1640?–1689) was a professional poet, dramatist, translator, and writer of fiction during the reigns of Charles II and James VII/II. The public record preserves few details of Behn’s early life before 1666, when she traveled to Antwerp as part of a covert mission to persuade William Scot, exile and son of the regicide Thomas Scot, to re-commit to the English crown and divulge details of its opponent’s strategic maneuvers during the second Anglo-Dutch war (1665–67). Largely unsuccessful in her spying activities, Behn returned to London where, in the autumn of 1670, the first of her seventeen plays was performed. She sustained a career in the commercial theater for almost two decades until her death in April 1689, by which time she had diversified her literary outputs to include verse and prose translations, panegyrics and elegies on matters of state, and significant contributions to the emerging novel form.