In Westminster Abbey, the literary pilgrimage runs to Poets' Corner, wall to wall with monuments to the titans of English writing. The woman who made a commercial career in writing possible for every woman who followed is not there. Aphra Behn is out in the East Cloister, near the steps, deliberately relegated to the margins of the club she helped build. Born around 1640 in Kent, her parentage is a historical blind spot: a barber's daughter, or a wet nurse's, or a Cooper, depending on the account. In a society obsessed with lineage, that background was no launching pad for a career near the royal court, so she scraped it away and wrote over it. She taught herself by copying English poems rather than learning the Latin and Greek that served as the era's gatekeeping mechanism, and later mocked the idea that real intellect required them. Her account ...