Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Trying. Today's podcast is a request from many listeners once again, and they include Georgia, Bree, Laura, Anna, Lauren, and Tabitha, who asked for it after I had actually already started working on it, and I'm sure many other people. It moved up to the top of the list after sort of tangentially coming up in our Irah Frederick Aldridge episode. Aldridge played a character called Orinoco in The Revolt of Surinam, and that was an adaptation of the play Orinoco by Thomas Southern, And that was an adaptation of Orinocco, a short work of fiction by today's subject afra Ben. There is really not a lot that's conclusively known about the life of Afroban, who, in addition to being a spy, was also a dramatist and a poet, a novelist, a translator, and probably the first woman in English literature known to have made a living as a writer. Even though she was prolific in her work, her gender meant that the sorts of institutions that were mostly keeping up with the details of writers and artists lives at the time did not really include her. Since she wasn't an aristocrat, there was no official family history, and she didn't really keep a diary or write a memoir or or corresponding a lot of letters, at least not many of that actually survived. And yet, even though there is so little concrete information, she's the subject of multiple biographies, and some of them are quite lengthy. Uh. With so little actual documentation to go on, a lot of these sort of pick up tiny pieces of the historical record and then try to glean details of her life from her written work. And this means that a lot of my agraphies about her are very heavily subject to interpretation. They tend to be influenced a lot by the biographers focus and their interpretation of her body of work. Uh. And in some cases, if you've read the words, probably and may have, you read like a quarter of the thing at least. So we're gonna do our best on this one. I feel like you're describing some sort of Afroban biographical mad libs kind of is. I mean, every biography is influenced by the biographer, even if you're trying, you know, even if the biographers trying really hard to have a very objective stance. This is particularly true with Afriban because there's so much that's like trying to piece together a teeny little puzzle with aty bitty pieces to make a whole life out of Yeah, with big gaps in the puzzle. Uh So it won't surprise you having listened to that introduction, that there is very very little known about Afroban's early life, and most of what we do know has been reconstructed did as Tracy just mentioned by following the threads available, a lot of which are other people's claims about her, and then the logical conclusions are drawn from there. So it is generally agreed that she was born sometime around sixteen forty, probably to a family who lived in why A village in Kent, England. Colonel Thomas Culpepper claimed that afra Ban's mother was his wet nurse and her father was reported to be a barber, so this makes the most likely candidates for her parents, Bartholomew and Elizabeth Johnson. They had a daughter, e Free spelled e A F. F r e y, and that was one of the many many variations in spelling for the name Afra at the time. This young e free was baptized on December fourteenth of sixteen forty, although some sources report that as the day of her birth. With her mother as his wet nurse, Afra would have been considered Thomas culpeppers foster sister, and the Culpeppers were a prominent family in the area. This connection to the cold Peppers would have given Afra access to far more educational opportunities and a wider social circle than she would have had as just the daughter of a wet nurse in a barber Although we don't have a lot of details about the specifics of her childhood and her adolescence, we do know that Afra grew up during a period of huge chaos and change. The English Civil Wars began when she was still a toddler, and this is a series of wars that obviously could be at least a whole episode all by themselves, so very briefly, the English Civil Wars also involved Scotland and Ireland, and they grew out of a conflict between King Charles the First and Parliament about who ultimately had control over the military. Following an uprising in Ireland during the English Civil Wars, the Parliamentarians faced off against the Royalists in a series of conflicts that ultimately led to a victory for the Parliamentarians. The execution of Charles the First in sixteen forty nine, the exile of his son Charles the Second, and the political rise of Oliver Cromwell, first Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. The total death toll in England was almost two hundred thousand. Obviously, that is as like the tiniest possible description of the English Civil Wars. During the interregnum years that followed from sixteen forty nine to sixteen sixty, the nation was no longer actively at war with itself, but it still had its fair share of strife. Many of those in Parliament were Puritans, and they started enforcing Puritans standards and views for the rest of the nation. Cromwell himself had a reputation as a radical and a fanatic, and his actions during the Civil Wars had included, among other things, a massacre in Ireland. Throughout the interregnum, Royalists continued to work toward the goal of restoring the monarchy. There's some speculation and that toward the end of the interregnum, Ben was already beginning her career as a spy by secretly carrying messages for Royalist organizations. She would have been connected to these organizations once again through Thomas Culpepper. Oliver Cromwell died in sixteen fifty eight, and by sixteen sixty one Charles the Second had been returned to the throne. So by the time Aframan hit her twenties, England had already been through a lot, and with Charles the Second's return, English life dramatically changed once again and a lot of circles. The restoration was met with a huge, hedonistic, fairly drunken party, and it was in this environment that afro Been really flourished a whole lot more than during the more puritanical interregnum years. In sixteen sixty three, when she was in her early twenties, Been traveled to Surinam, and this would later become the setting for her work of fiction Orinocco. Orinocco is often discussed as part of Ben's earlier work because her visit there would have happened, as we just said, when she was in her early twenties, but in reality this piece wasn't published until shortly before her death. Orinocco tells the story of a prince from the Gold Coast and what is now Ghana who's invited aboard a ship and then enslaved before being sold in Surinam, and that's where he meets the book's narrator. This narrator is an english woman who had come to Surinam with her father, but he died during the sea voyage. Some biographies actually take this plot point from Orinoco and apply it to Ben's real life father, although he had likely died by the early mid sixteen sixties. It's completely unclear whether this aspect of Orinoco is supposed to be autobiographical. There's also a debate about whether the book's narrator is supposed to be a stand in for Ben herself, and that part similarly foggy. But since Orinocco does contain a lot of detail about Surinam and people who really lived there in the sixties sixties, it's easy to think of it as evidence that the trip to Surinam really did happen. Regardless of whether the story it tells is supposed to be autobiographical. Also, although Ben's own views on slavery are pretty hard to tease out from her writing, Orinoco itself was considered an abolitionist work of fiction in both the eighteenth and nineteen centuries. Yeah, there are a lot of attempts to try to figure out what her racial views were based on the content of her writing, And the most logical conclusion is that she had a lot of the prejudices that were sort of ingrained in society, especially English society at the time. Um. And it's like when you read Orinoco, and a lot of it is very sympathetic to the people who are enslaved in the book, but it's it's sort of a most like proto abolitionist text, like it was definitely read that way for a couple of centuries. But there's also a lot of stuff in it that that is, you know, obviously laced with implicit biases and racism because it was written in the six century. Even though Orinocco itself as a book didn't come out until much later. Afroman was writing while in Surinam, including an early draft of a play called The Young King or a Mistake. Like several of Ben's other plays, it's a tragic comedy, and it tells the story of a royal brother and sister brought up in opposite roles because of a prophecy. The boy is quote kept from his infancy and a castle on a lake, ignorant of his quality and of all the world, besides never having seen any humane things save only his old tutor, while the girl is quote bred up in war and designed to reign in place of her brother. It plays around with gender and ideas of masculinity and femininity, which is a hallmark of Ben's later work as well. Then tripped to Surinam wasn't particularly long. She returned to England in sixteen sixty four, and not long after she was given an audience with King Charles the Second to report on what she had witnessed there. It's not completely clear whether the King saw this as part of her spy career, but she definitely spied for him later, and we're gonna start talking about that, but first we're gonna pause and have a little bit of a sponsor break. About the same time as she returned from Surinam in sixteen sixty four, Afriban married a man whose name was as you would conclude Ben or maybe being described as quote a merchant of Dutch extraction. It might have been the Great Plague of London which struck in sixteen sixty five that killed Ben's husband. He was dead by sixteen sixty six. On top of the plague, England was once again at war. The Second Anglo Dutch War began on March fourth of sixteen sixty five, and this part of a series of four wars between England and the Dutch Republic and their allies. The first three were largely trade wars, but the fourth was in response to Dutch involvement in the American Revolutionary War. Regardless of whether Ben had officially been doing spy work during the interregnum or in Surinam, she definitely was during the Second Anglo Dutch War, using the code name Astraea. Ultimately reporting to the Secretary of State, Lord Henry Bennett. She was assigned to travel to Antwerp, which is now in Belgium but was then in Spanish Netherlands, to meet with William Scott. Scott's father, Thomas, had been the man who signed Charles the first death warrant for which he was later executed, and Scott himself was essentially acting as a double agent. He was gathering intelligence for England while also informing on the English to the Dutch. Armed with bribe, money and the promise of a pardon, Ben's mission was to figure out whether Scott had worthwhile intelligence, and if he did, to get that intelligence back to England. Ben was likely chosen for this mission because she and Scott had met in Surinam. They had a bit of a flirtation there. In theory, this flirtation was nothing serious enough to jeopardize Ben's judgment, but it was enough of an existing connection to Scott to sort of soften him up a little. She was given passage to Spanish Flanders and enough money to take care of her own needs during a short stay there. Her brother, who was in the military, was temporary temporarily released from service to act as her chaperone. Apparently, Lord Bennett wasn't wasn't aware that she was a widow, which would have given her a little more autonomy than an unmarried woman would have had. She received her money and instructions in July of sixteen sixty six and She was an Antwerp by August, but her time as a spy was not very successful. She flirted with Scott until he finally agreed to pass her information, but then he got her to agree to leave Antwerp and meet him in the Hague. And if she did that, not only was she very likely to be captured, but she was also sure to run out of her already dwindling supply of money. And this started the pair of them on a cycle of back and forth, with him getting her to agree to leave Flanders, and then her pulling back on that agreement and another hiccup. This back and forth between Scott and Ben also got tangled up with one William Corney, a merchant from Amsterdam who was also passing intelligence back to Lord Bennett. Before long, the three of them were just continually trying to undermine one another, and this convoluted backstabby triangle, word of which spread to London and started to threaten Ben's reputation. The idea that Ben's previous flirtation with Scott wouldn't be a threat to her also didn't really pan out, as Corney became a greater threat to both of them. They started to rely on and confide in each other in a way that didn't really leave Ben a whole lot of power to try to get the man to give her information. Eventually, Scott fled Flanders out of fear that Corny was going to kill him, and once he was gone, Corny focused all his attention on Ben, tailing her and forging reports in her name to discredit her. Scott wound up in prison, and although he did keep writing to Ben, he couldn't learn much while behind bars, and she had no way to pay for a passage home. When Scott was released from prison in sixteen sixty seven, he was also banished, leaving Ben with no way of getting whatever intelligence he still had. Throughout all of this, Ben was using ciphers and codes to send information back to London, but very little of this information was of actual value. She's often reported as having passed on a warning of the Dutch raid on Medway, which took place in June of sixteen sixty seven. This raid was a devastating blow to the British Navy, and while this is technically true, she did send that information, other agents also delivered this aim information and none of it was heated, not even when another agent gave Lord Bennett a very specific warning about the upcoming attack after Ben had already returned to London, and getting back to London required Ben to beg for the funds to do so. She'd been so low on money that she'd handed over all her possessions to her innkeeper as collateral so she wouldn't lose her lodgings along with everything else. Although she was able to get a couple of loans to pay off the worst of her debts, it was only after numerous letters and lots of borrowing that she was able to get someone to pay for her passage. And it's unclear who that was, but it wasn't the administration that had sent her to Antwerp in the first place. Even though her spy life was not very effective, but still was pretty crummy that she was sent on this mission with no way of getting back home out of hostile territory. According to most accounts, after Afroban's returned to England in the spring of sixteen sixty seven, she wound up in a debtor's prison. There's very little detail on this. She had written multiple letters to the people who had recruited her into the life of espionage and to other contacts that she had, all in an effort to pay off her debts. And it seems as though she either eventually did get someone to loan her enough money to get out of prison, or she made arrangement arrangements to pay her debt off gradually as she was able to earn enough money to do so. And the way that she earned that money was by writing, and we're going to talk about that after we once again paused for a quick sponsor break. After she got out of the debtor's prison, afro Ben was able to make something of a fresh start for herself. By the summer of sixteen sixty seven, London had recently been through both the Great Plague and the Great Fire, and although the raid on Medway had taken place at the mouth of the Thames River and not up in the city, it had destroyed much of the British naval fleet and block hated the city, which left the already shaken people living there feeling particularly defenseless. So in a fairly dispirited and anxious city, Ben was able to quietly make a space for herself, renting lodgings and working as a copyist, probably copying the sorts of material people would want handled with more discretion than a commercial printing press could allow. While copying definitely would have helped her make ends meet, it was not really enough to live comfortably, and soon Ben was also writing and publishing poems. She adopted her code name Austraya for a pseudonym for a lot of her written work as it was published at the time. Fortunately for Ben, King Charles the second loved the theater, and he chartered to theater companies known as the King's Company and the Duke's Company. The King's Company had the rights to a lot of existing plays, including works by Shakespeare and Ben Johnson. The Duke's Company didn't, meaning there was a market for newly written plays. The plays themselves were often Body and Blue, with women allowed on the stage rather than having female roles played by men. It's unclear exactly how Ben first got her foot in the door as a playwright through her spy work. She did no Thomas Killigrew, who was head of the King's Men and later the Master of the Revels, but it was the Duke's Company and not the King's where her work first debuted. Of her first play to be staged. There was The Forced Marriage or The Jealous Bridegroom, a tragic comedy, which opened on September. Ben was much savvier about playwriting as an occupation than she had been about her espionage career. She wanted to make sure she kept the rights to her plays, and she wanted them to be published, which would give her an additional source of income. Most of her plays were also published during her lifetime, although the first printing of The Forced Marriage, which was probably rushed to follow the plays performance and take advantage of that publicity, was full of error, herosism, things printed and completely the wrong order. It was kind of a mess. Her next play to be staged opened just a few months later, and it was named The Amorous Prince, and like its name suggests, it's full of seductions and it plays around a lot with gender and cross dressing in a way that would become a frequent theme in Ben's works. Ben would go on to write nineteen plays, including the two parts. The Rover was seventeen of them stage during her lifetime. She wasn't the first woman to write for the British stage, but the idea of a woman playwright was still rare enough that her position was relatively unique, and she got a lot of criticism for the more risk ay content of her work, which was full of innuendo and double entendres. This was particularly true since in both her plays and her novels, she seemed to blur the line between her narrator and herself. Even so, she pointed to similarities in the work of her contemporaries and predecessors as evidence that it would not have been frowned upon if she were a man. As the theater gradually fell a little bit more out of favor in the sixteen eighties, Ben shifted her focus to writing novels, and she penned sixteen works of fiction, all of which have narrators who were either obviously female or have no specified gender. She also continued to write poetry throughout her career, and although some of her poems were incorporated into her plays and fiction, many of them were meant for a smaller audience. They often contained inside references to what was going on in London society and politics, sometimes with names changed but otherwise easily recognizable to people in the no Some of her poems were essentially social and political commentary, rendered in verse and only really understandable if you knew the context of what was going on around her. Much of Ben's work, especially in poetry, was romantic and sensual and even erotic, with both women and men as the sub jecks of her love poems, some of which also played with themes of androgyny and gender fluidity. The relationships depicted in her dramas are all over the map in terms of gender and sexual orientation. In terms of her personal life, her most public relationship during her time as a writer was with John Hoyle, whose own life with threat was threaded through with lots and lots of scandal, including his relationships with other men. As Ben's writing career became more lucrative, she became increasingly more active in London society. She developed a reputation for being witty and charismatic and of liking to drink. She earned the nickname the Incomparable Australia, and in her poetry people called her the successor to Sappho. After more than twenty years making a living as a writer, Afroban died on April sixteenth, eighty nine, at roughly fifty years old. A few days later, a piece called an elegy upon the death of Mrs A Ben, the incomparable Drea, written by quote a young lady of quality, was published. It read in part quote, let all our hopes to spare and die our sex forever shall neglected. Lie. Aspiring man has now regained this way to them, we've lost the dismal day. The first biography of her came out in sixteen ninety six, called Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Ben, by a Gentlewoman of her acquaintance, and that was part of her collected histories and novels. Although its author was likely Charles Gilden, the first uh. This first biography is definitely a mix of embellishment, absolute total fiction, and a little bit of fact, and it was written in part to try to sell the collection of her work with which it was published. Even so, that and passages of her fiction that seem autobiographical have been picked up and repeated as fact over and over throughout the centuries. Although today afro Ben is known as one of the seventeenth century these most influential playwrights and a groundbreaking writer in the genre of the novel, she fell sharply out of favor after her death as the hedonism and licentiousness and that general drunken party flare of the Restoration became socially unacceptable, so did Afriban and her work. Critics decried her as a woman of loose moral character, and they condemned her work outright. That started to change though, in the early twentieth century, when the English writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group picked up her life and work as part of feminist history. Poet and novelist Vita Sackville West wrote Afraban The Incomparable Austraia, which was a biographical fiction that seems to treat Ben's life as a missed opportunity. Author Virginia Wolfe wrote of her quote, all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of afra Been, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It's kind of funny, they both seemed to pray. It's her so highly for having made a living as a writer. Uh and have an affinity for some of the like same sex content or her poems and some of which are read as uh like explicitly lesbian love poems. But they have this theme, this sort of undertone of like I wish she hadn't been writing such garbage in terms of like all this very coarse humor and body sexuality. Um. But you know, today I think folks are a lot, a lot more accepting of that part of it than they maybe were in the nineteen hundreds. Do you also have some listener mail for us? I sure do. Before I get to that, Afred's very large book, Janet Todd's The Secret Life of Afra Ben is one of the many resources of this It is astonishingly hefty considering how little of her work is known about, but it gets into a whole lot of um other stuff that was going on in Britain in the time, and analysis of her work, and lots and lots of good stuff. So if you want to learn more, uh, that is one place to go before we get to listener mail. It is still March. March is still tripod month. When podcaster talking about other podcasts that we listened to and love, I really really enjoyed the Politically Reactive podcast with W. Kmal Bell and Harrie Condabulu, which came out in the weeks leading up to and just after the presidential election, with really interesting interviews with lots of folks about the political climate in the United States and uh different issues relevant to the election. And Holly just let me know that there's going to be a second season and I'm so excited me too. That was like a magical little gift in my podcast app this morning. Ha was there little mini episode where they said that that was going to happen. Yes, So I am very much looking forward to that. So if you go on h on Twitter looking at the hashtag tripod t r y p o D, you will find lots of recommendations from us and from other people. And now I will get to uh some listener mail, and this is from Madeline. Madeline says, Hi, they're Tracy and Holly. I have to tell y'all that I had a bit of an odd reaction when I saw the title of your newest episode pop up in my phone's notifications yesterday. I was a bit excited, in spite of the grizzly topic, because it is a piece of history I know about and have a distant familial connection to. Growing up, my nuclear family typically visited my great grandparents, my mother's mother's parents, and Henderson, Texas every Thanksgiving. Very occasionally in between. These great grandparents both lived until I was a grown woman, so I have fond memories of them and their home from childhood, my teenage years, and into college. I specifically remember enjoying looking at the photos and what we call the family gallery at their house. I did this at my grandmother's house to occasionally at my own childhood home. This tradition of hanging all our family photos and one section of wall in a hallway was continued in my own home. Now. Generations of children in my family have used these galleries to learn who all their people are, including my own child. At my great grandparents house, there was one picture in the gallery that I was always a bit puzzled by. It was hard to remember who the young blonde girl in the old black and white photo was and how I was related to her. I was usually only told something along the lines of that's grandmother's cousin who died in the New London explosion, and that's it. At some point someone told me her name Maxim and that the explosion was at the school. I suspect a combination of my own tender age and a general reluctance in Ruskue County to talk about the tragedy had led to me knowing very little about Maxim, but her photo was always there in the family gallery. Before I listened to your podcast about the explosion, I called my mom for more of our family's information. Shouldn't have a whole lot to add about ten year old Maxine and not knowing much more than I do myself, but I should tell me more about the explosion than I had heard before. Apparently, being nearly nearly thirty years old, I am no longer to ten or an age for these things. Her account was that about three hundred people died and an explosion at the school caused by a natural gas link in the basement. She added that this one horrific day in a small East Texas town as the reason natural gas now has a smell, and she also mentioned that boards were put down to help smooth out the path to the rebel for trucks that were coming to help, only later to realize that some of the dead had been under those boards. And the other than these things my mother referred to me, My mother referred me to her mother for more. So I've emailed a link to your show to my grandmother along with her request for more information about the explosion. She was still an infant living with her parents and Henderson at the time, but she is an excellent family historian, so I hope for some insight and that she will allow me to share it with y'all. Before I finished up, I have a question about a small detail in the episode. My mom mentioned a basement at the school. I interrupted her to point out the oddity of such an idea. I grew up in Central Texas, where the idea of a basement is laughable. The limestone is too close to the surface of the soil for basements to be cost if I theyve in most situations the state capital nonwithstanding, But having visited East Texas so often throughout my life, the idea of a basement in the school in New London seems odd too. I've never heard of a basements in Rusk County before, so I take a particular note when y'all said that was the space below a hollow floor where the gas accumulated. At the introduction of Your Texas Monthly source that interview survivors also calls it a basement. Haven't looked through all the show notes for the episode yet, but I'm wondering why you did not call it a basement. Was it an actual basement? Is was the basement a word used by people in the region to describe something along the lines of an enclosed crawl space, or wasn't something else? Based on y'all's description, I'm picturing something that is essentially the opposite of a drop ceiling. I hope it is not as odd as what I mentioned. Uh. And then she goes on to um say that she'll let us know if her grandfather has any good tidbits. UM, and thanks us both for the work we do on the podcast. Thank you, Madeleine. Uh. I wanted to read that for two reasons. One is the personal connection of the other is the basement. The idea that the explosions started in a basement is all over the place among survivor accounts, But there is so much contradictory detail about what the school's structure was actually like, uh, that I don't think we can answer the question of whether there was really a full basement. Like I think of a basement is a thing you could walk down to on stairs that has like an a full ceiling above your head. Right, I'm gesturing versus like a crawl. Right, So it's even in the more detailed descriptions of the school, the description is like not necessarily that there was something that was a full basement the entire length of the school. Like, it's just very hard to pen down and confusing, and possibly if I like went to Rest County and dug through old blueprints of the school, that question could be conclusively answered to be well. And it also gets into the semantics of the word basement right right, like what somebody would call a seller, or someone else might call a basement, someone else might call across space. So literally looked this up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Uh so, yeah, it's unclear, and like there are a lot of things in the survivor accounts that seem to have been picked up and have become part of the collective memory, but are definitely not what happened. Um, Like a news a news station posted about the uh the anniversary of the tragedy, and somebody tagged our podcast page, which is why I even saw it. And there was some there were people commenting that were like, yes, I was there that day. I was in the gym with my mom because of the gas smell, but there definitely was no gas smell. So like we have this combination of the fact that the building was completely obliterated and had been built almost you know, more than eighty years ago at this point, and the most of the folks alive today who still remember it were small children at time, so I could not tell you whether it was really a basement. UH. If if you would like to write to us about this or any other podcasts or I don't know, send us a scan of the blueprints. We originally New London School or History podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook dot at Facebook dot com, slash miss in History on Twitter at miss in History. That miss in History is basically our name all over social media, so that's also where you will find our tumbler and our pinterest in our Instagram. You can come to our parent company's website, which is how stuff works dot com to find all kinds of information about whatever your heart desires. And you can come to our website, which is missed in history dot com, where you will find uh an archive of every episode that has ever existed on the podcast. You will find the show notes for all of our podcasts older ones are separate posts, but newer ones are part the episode player page, and that is where you will find more information about the book that I referenced earlier. So you can do all of that and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or mrs in history dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.

Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Trying. Today's podcast is a request from many listeners once again, and they include Georgia, Bree, Laura, Anna, Lauren, and Tabitha, who asked for it after I had actually already started working on it, and I'm sure many other people. It moved up to the top of the list after sort of tangentially coming up in our Irah Frederick Aldridge episode. Aldridge played a character called Orinoco in The Revolt of Surinam, and that was an adaptation of the play Orinoco by Thomas Southern, And that was an adaptation of Orinocco, a short work of fiction by today's subject afra Ben. There is really not a lot that's conclusively known about the life of Afroban, who, in addition to being a spy, was also a dramatist and a poet, a novelist, a translator, and probably the first woman in English literature known to have made a living as a writer. Even though she was prolific in her work, her gender meant that the sorts of institutions that were mostly keeping up with the details of writers and artists lives at the time did not really include her. Since she wasn't an aristocrat, there was no official family history, and she didn't really keep a diary or write a memoir or or corresponding a lot of letters, at least not many of that actually survived. And yet, even though there is so little concrete information, she's the subject of multiple biographies, and some of them are quite lengthy. Uh. With so little actual documentation to go on, a lot of these sort of pick up tiny pieces of the historical record and then try to glean details of her life from her written work. And this means that a lot of my agraphies about her are very heavily subject to interpretation. They tend to be influenced a lot by the biographers focus and their interpretation of her body of work. Uh. And in some cases, if you've read the words, probably and may have, you read like a quarter of the thing at least. So we're gonna do our best on this one. I feel like you're describing some sort of Afroban biographical mad libs kind of is. I mean, every biography is influenced by the biographer, even if you're trying, you know, even if the biographers trying really hard to have a very objective stance. This is particularly true with Afriban because there's so much that's like trying to piece together a teeny little puzzle with aty bitty pieces to make a whole life out of Yeah, with big gaps in the puzzle. Uh So it won't surprise you having listened to that introduction, that there is very very little known about Afroban's early life, and most of what we do know has been reconstructed did as Tracy just mentioned by following the threads available, a lot of which are other people's claims about her, and then the logical conclusions are drawn from there. So it is generally agreed that she was born sometime around sixteen forty, probably to a family who lived in why A village in Kent, England. Colonel Thomas Culpepper claimed that afra Ban's mother was his wet nurse and her father was reported to be a barber, so this makes the most likely candidates for her parents, Bartholomew and Elizabeth Johnson. They had a daughter, e Free spelled e A F. F r e y, and that was one of the many many variations in spelling for the name Afra at the time. This young e free was baptized on December fourteenth of sixteen forty, although some sources report that as the day of her birth. With her mother as his wet nurse, Afra would have been considered Thomas culpeppers foster sister, and the Culpeppers were a prominent family in the area. This connection to the cold Peppers would have given Afra access to far more educational opportunities and a wider social circle than she would have had as just the daughter of a wet nurse in a barber Although we don't have a lot of details about the specifics of her childhood and her adolescence, we do know that Afra grew up during a period of huge chaos and change. The English Civil Wars began when she was still a toddler, and this is a series of wars that obviously could be at least a whole episode all by themselves, so very briefly, the English Civil Wars also involved Scotland and Ireland, and they grew out of a conflict between King Charles the First and Parliament about who ultimately had control over the military. Following an uprising in Ireland during the English Civil Wars, the Parliamentarians faced off against the Royalists in a series of conflicts that ultimately led to a victory for the Parliamentarians. The execution of Charles the First in sixteen forty nine, the exile of his son Charles the Second, and the political rise of Oliver Cromwell, first Lord Protector of the Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. The total death toll in England was almost two hundred thousand. Obviously, that is as like the tiniest possible description of the English Civil Wars. During the interregnum years that followed from sixteen forty nine to sixteen sixty, the nation was no longer actively at war with itself, but it still had its fair share of strife. Many of those in Parliament were Puritans, and they started enforcing Puritans standards and views for the rest of the nation. Cromwell himself had a reputation as a radical and a fanatic, and his actions during the Civil Wars had included, among other things, a massacre in Ireland. Throughout the interregnum, Royalists continued to work toward the goal of restoring the monarchy. There's some speculation and that toward the end of the interregnum, Ben was already beginning her career as a spy by secretly carrying messages for Royalist organizations. She would have been connected to these organizations once again through Thomas Culpepper. Oliver Cromwell died in sixteen fifty eight, and by sixteen sixty one Charles the Second had been returned to the throne. So by the time Aframan hit her twenties, England had already been through a lot, and with Charles the Second's return, English life dramatically changed once again and a lot of circles. The restoration was met with a huge, hedonistic, fairly drunken party, and it was in this environment that afro Been really flourished a whole lot more than during the more puritanical interregnum years. In sixteen sixty three, when she was in her early twenties, Been traveled to Surinam, and this would later become the setting for her work of fiction Orinocco. Orinocco is often discussed as part of Ben's earlier work because her visit there would have happened, as we just said, when she was in her early twenties, but in reality this piece wasn't published until shortly before her death. Orinocco tells the story of a prince from the Gold Coast and what is now Ghana who's invited aboard a ship and then enslaved before being sold in Surinam, and that's where he meets the book's narrator. This narrator is an english woman who had come to Surinam with her father, but he died during the sea voyage. Some biographies actually take this plot point from Orinoco and apply it to Ben's real life father, although he had likely died by the early mid sixteen sixties. It's completely unclear whether this aspect of Orinoco is supposed to be autobiographical. There's also a debate about whether the book's narrator is supposed to be a stand in for Ben herself, and that part similarly foggy. But since Orinocco does contain a lot of detail about Surinam and people who really lived there in the sixties sixties, it's easy to think of it as evidence that the trip to Surinam really did happen. Regardless of whether the story it tells is supposed to be autobiographical. Also, although Ben's own views on slavery are pretty hard to tease out from her writing, Orinoco itself was considered an abolitionist work of fiction in both the eighteenth and nineteen centuries. Yeah, there are a lot of attempts to try to figure out what her racial views were based on the content of her writing, And the most logical conclusion is that she had a lot of the prejudices that were sort of ingrained in society, especially English society at the time. Um. And it's like when you read Orinoco, and a lot of it is very sympathetic to the people who are enslaved in the book, but it's it's sort of a most like proto abolitionist text, like it was definitely read that way for a couple of centuries. But there's also a lot of stuff in it that that is, you know, obviously laced with implicit biases and racism because it was written in the six century. Even though Orinocco itself as a book didn't come out until much later. Afroman was writing while in Surinam, including an early draft of a play called The Young King or a Mistake. Like several of Ben's other plays, it's a tragic comedy, and it tells the story of a royal brother and sister brought up in opposite roles because of a prophecy. The boy is quote kept from his infancy and a castle on a lake, ignorant of his quality and of all the world, besides never having seen any humane things save only his old tutor, while the girl is quote bred up in war and designed to reign in place of her brother. It plays around with gender and ideas of masculinity and femininity, which is a hallmark of Ben's later work as well. Then tripped to Surinam wasn't particularly long. She returned to England in sixteen sixty four, and not long after she was given an audience with King Charles the Second to report on what she had witnessed there. It's not completely clear whether the King saw this as part of her spy career, but she definitely spied for him later, and we're gonna start talking about that, but first we're gonna pause and have a little bit of a sponsor break. About the same time as she returned from Surinam in sixteen sixty four, Afriban married a man whose name was as you would conclude Ben or maybe being described as quote a merchant of Dutch extraction. It might have been the Great Plague of London which struck in sixteen sixty five that killed Ben's husband. He was dead by sixteen sixty six. On top of the plague, England was once again at war. The Second Anglo Dutch War began on March fourth of sixteen sixty five, and this part of a series of four wars between England and the Dutch Republic and their allies. The first three were largely trade wars, but the fourth was in response to Dutch involvement in the American Revolutionary War. Regardless of whether Ben had officially been doing spy work during the interregnum or in Surinam, she definitely was during the Second Anglo Dutch War, using the code name Astraea. Ultimately reporting to the Secretary of State, Lord Henry Bennett. She was assigned to travel to Antwerp, which is now in Belgium but was then in Spanish Netherlands, to meet with William Scott. Scott's father, Thomas, had been the man who signed Charles the first death warrant for which he was later executed, and Scott himself was essentially acting as a double agent. He was gathering intelligence for England while also informing on the English to the Dutch. Armed with bribe, money and the promise of a pardon, Ben's mission was to figure out whether Scott had worthwhile intelligence, and if he did, to get that intelligence back to England. Ben was likely chosen for this mission because she and Scott had met in Surinam. They had a bit of a flirtation there. In theory, this flirtation was nothing serious enough to jeopardize Ben's judgment, but it was enough of an existing connection to Scott to sort of soften him up a little. She was given passage to Spanish Flanders and enough money to take care of her own needs during a short stay there. Her brother, who was in the military, was temporary temporarily released from service to act as her chaperone. Apparently, Lord Bennett wasn't wasn't aware that she was a widow, which would have given her a little more autonomy than an unmarried woman would have had. She received her money and instructions in July of sixteen sixty six and She was an Antwerp by August, but her time as a spy was not very successful. She flirted with Scott until he finally agreed to pass her information, but then he got her to agree to leave Antwerp and meet him in the Hague. And if she did that, not only was she very likely to be captured, but she was also sure to run out of her already dwindling supply of money. And this started the pair of them on a cycle of back and forth, with him getting her to agree to leave Flanders, and then her pulling back on that agreement and another hiccup. This back and forth between Scott and Ben also got tangled up with one William Corney, a merchant from Amsterdam who was also passing intelligence back to Lord Bennett. Before long, the three of them were just continually trying to undermine one another, and this convoluted backstabby triangle, word of which spread to London and started to threaten Ben's reputation. The idea that Ben's previous flirtation with Scott wouldn't be a threat to her also didn't really pan out, as Corney became a greater threat to both of them. They started to rely on and confide in each other in a way that didn't really leave Ben a whole lot of power to try to get the man to give her information. Eventually, Scott fled Flanders out of fear that Corny was going to kill him, and once he was gone, Corny focused all his attention on Ben, tailing her and forging reports in her name to discredit her. Scott wound up in prison, and although he did keep writing to Ben, he couldn't learn much while behind bars, and she had no way to pay for a passage home. When Scott was released from prison in sixteen sixty seven, he was also banished, leaving Ben with no way of getting whatever intelligence he still had. Throughout all of this, Ben was using ciphers and codes to send information back to London, but very little of this information was of actual value. She's often reported as having passed on a warning of the Dutch raid on Medway, which took place in June of sixteen sixty seven. This raid was a devastating blow to the British Navy, and while this is technically true, she did send that information, other agents also delivered this aim information and none of it was heated, not even when another agent gave Lord Bennett a very specific warning about the upcoming attack after Ben had already returned to London, and getting back to London required Ben to beg for the funds to do so. She'd been so low on money that she'd handed over all her possessions to her innkeeper as collateral so she wouldn't lose her lodgings along with everything else. Although she was able to get a couple of loans to pay off the worst of her debts, it was only after numerous letters and lots of borrowing that she was able to get someone to pay for her passage. And it's unclear who that was, but it wasn't the administration that had sent her to Antwerp in the first place. Even though her spy life was not very effective, but still was pretty crummy that she was sent on this mission with no way of getting back home out of hostile territory. According to most accounts, after Afroban's returned to England in the spring of sixteen sixty seven, she wound up in a debtor's prison. There's very little detail on this. She had written multiple letters to the people who had recruited her into the life of espionage and to other contacts that she had, all in an effort to pay off her debts. And it seems as though she either eventually did get someone to loan her enough money to get out of prison, or she made arrangement arrangements to pay her debt off gradually as she was able to earn enough money to do so. And the way that she earned that money was by writing, and we're going to talk about that after we once again paused for a quick sponsor break. After she got out of the debtor's prison, afro Ben was able to make something of a fresh start for herself. By the summer of sixteen sixty seven, London had recently been through both the Great Plague and the Great Fire, and although the raid on Medway had taken place at the mouth of the Thames River and not up in the city, it had destroyed much of the British naval fleet and block hated the city, which left the already shaken people living there feeling particularly defenseless. So in a fairly dispirited and anxious city, Ben was able to quietly make a space for herself, renting lodgings and working as a copyist, probably copying the sorts of material people would want handled with more discretion than a commercial printing press could allow. While copying definitely would have helped her make ends meet, it was not really enough to live comfortably, and soon Ben was also writing and publishing poems. She adopted her code name Austraya for a pseudonym for a lot of her written work as it was published at the time. Fortunately for Ben, King Charles the second loved the theater, and he chartered to theater companies known as the King's Company and the Duke's Company. The King's Company had the rights to a lot of existing plays, including works by Shakespeare and Ben Johnson. The Duke's Company didn't, meaning there was a market for newly written plays. The plays themselves were often Body and Blue, with women allowed on the stage rather than having female roles played by men. It's unclear exactly how Ben first got her foot in the door as a playwright through her spy work. She did no Thomas Killigrew, who was head of the King's Men and later the Master of the Revels, but it was the Duke's Company and not the King's where her work first debuted. Of her first play to be staged. There was The Forced Marriage or The Jealous Bridegroom, a tragic comedy, which opened on September. Ben was much savvier about playwriting as an occupation than she had been about her espionage career. She wanted to make sure she kept the rights to her plays, and she wanted them to be published, which would give her an additional source of income. Most of her plays were also published during her lifetime, although the first printing of The Forced Marriage, which was probably rushed to follow the plays performance and take advantage of that publicity, was full of error, herosism, things printed and completely the wrong order. It was kind of a mess. Her next play to be staged opened just a few months later, and it was named The Amorous Prince, and like its name suggests, it's full of seductions and it plays around a lot with gender and cross dressing in a way that would become a frequent theme in Ben's works. Ben would go on to write nineteen plays, including the two parts. The Rover was seventeen of them stage during her lifetime. She wasn't the first woman to write for the British stage, but the idea of a woman playwright was still rare enough that her position was relatively unique, and she got a lot of criticism for the more risk ay content of her work, which was full of innuendo and double entendres. This was particularly true since in both her plays and her novels, she seemed to blur the line between her narrator and herself. Even so, she pointed to similarities in the work of her contemporaries and predecessors as evidence that it would not have been frowned upon if she were a man. As the theater gradually fell a little bit more out of favor in the sixteen eighties, Ben shifted her focus to writing novels, and she penned sixteen works of fiction, all of which have narrators who were either obviously female or have no specified gender. She also continued to write poetry throughout her career, and although some of her poems were incorporated into her plays and fiction, many of them were meant for a smaller audience. They often contained inside references to what was going on in London society and politics, sometimes with names changed but otherwise easily recognizable to people in the no Some of her poems were essentially social and political commentary, rendered in verse and only really understandable if you knew the context of what was going on around her. Much of Ben's work, especially in poetry, was romantic and sensual and even erotic, with both women and men as the sub jecks of her love poems, some of which also played with themes of androgyny and gender fluidity. The relationships depicted in her dramas are all over the map in terms of gender and sexual orientation. In terms of her personal life, her most public relationship during her time as a writer was with John Hoyle, whose own life with threat was threaded through with lots and lots of scandal, including his relationships with other men. As Ben's writing career became more lucrative, she became increasingly more active in London society. She developed a reputation for being witty and charismatic and of liking to drink. She earned the nickname the Incomparable Australia, and in her poetry people called her the successor to Sappho. After more than twenty years making a living as a writer, Afroban died on April sixteenth, eighty nine, at roughly fifty years old. A few days later, a piece called an elegy upon the death of Mrs A Ben, the incomparable Drea, written by quote a young lady of quality, was published. It read in part quote, let all our hopes to spare and die our sex forever shall neglected. Lie. Aspiring man has now regained this way to them, we've lost the dismal day. The first biography of her came out in sixteen ninety six, called Memoirs of the Life of Mrs Ben, by a Gentlewoman of her acquaintance, and that was part of her collected histories and novels. Although its author was likely Charles Gilden, the first uh. This first biography is definitely a mix of embellishment, absolute total fiction, and a little bit of fact, and it was written in part to try to sell the collection of her work with which it was published. Even so, that and passages of her fiction that seem autobiographical have been picked up and repeated as fact over and over throughout the centuries. Although today afro Ben is known as one of the seventeenth century these most influential playwrights and a groundbreaking writer in the genre of the novel, she fell sharply out of favor after her death as the hedonism and licentiousness and that general drunken party flare of the Restoration became socially unacceptable, so did Afriban and her work. Critics decried her as a woman of loose moral character, and they condemned her work outright. That started to change though, in the early twentieth century, when the English writers and artists known as the Bloomsbury Group picked up her life and work as part of feminist history. Poet and novelist Vita Sackville West wrote Afraban The Incomparable Austraia, which was a biographical fiction that seems to treat Ben's life as a missed opportunity. Author Virginia Wolfe wrote of her quote, all women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of afra Been, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds. It's kind of funny, they both seemed to pray. It's her so highly for having made a living as a writer. Uh and have an affinity for some of the like same sex content or her poems and some of which are read as uh like explicitly lesbian love poems. But they have this theme, this sort of undertone of like I wish she hadn't been writing such garbage in terms of like all this very coarse humor and body sexuality. Um. But you know, today I think folks are a lot, a lot more accepting of that part of it than they maybe were in the nineteen hundreds. Do you also have some listener mail for us? I sure do. Before I get to that, Afred's very large book, Janet Todd's The Secret Life of Afra Ben is one of the many resources of this It is astonishingly hefty considering how little of her work is known about, but it gets into a whole lot of um other stuff that was going on in Britain in the time, and analysis of her work, and lots and lots of good stuff. So if you want to learn more, uh, that is one place to go before we get to listener mail. It is still March. March is still tripod month. When podcaster talking about other podcasts that we listened to and love, I really really enjoyed the Politically Reactive podcast with W. Kmal Bell and Harrie Condabulu, which came out in the weeks leading up to and just after the presidential election, with really interesting interviews with lots of folks about the political climate in the United States and uh different issues relevant to the election. And Holly just let me know that there's going to be a second season and I'm so excited me too. That was like a magical little gift in my podcast app this morning. Ha was there little mini episode where they said that that was going to happen. Yes, So I am very much looking forward to that. So if you go on h on Twitter looking at the hashtag tripod t r y p o D, you will find lots of recommendations from us and from other people. And now I will get to uh some listener mail, and this is from Madeline. Madeline says, Hi, they're Tracy and Holly. I have to tell y'all that I had a bit of an odd reaction when I saw the title of your newest episode pop up in my phone's notifications yesterday. I was a bit excited, in spite of the grizzly topic, because it is a piece of history I know about and have a distant familial connection to. Growing up, my nuclear family typically visited my great grandparents, my mother's mother's parents, and Henderson, Texas every Thanksgiving. Very occasionally in between. These great grandparents both lived until I was a grown woman, so I have fond memories of them and their home from childhood, my teenage years, and into college. I specifically remember enjoying looking at the photos and what we call the family gallery at their house. I did this at my grandmother's house to occasionally at my own childhood home. This tradition of hanging all our family photos and one section of wall in a hallway was continued in my own home. Now. Generations of children in my family have used these galleries to learn who all their people are, including my own child. At my great grandparents house, there was one picture in the gallery that I was always a bit puzzled by. It was hard to remember who the young blonde girl in the old black and white photo was and how I was related to her. I was usually only told something along the lines of that's grandmother's cousin who died in the New London explosion, and that's it. At some point someone told me her name Maxim and that the explosion was at the school. I suspect a combination of my own tender age and a general reluctance in Ruskue County to talk about the tragedy had led to me knowing very little about Maxim, but her photo was always there in the family gallery. Before I listened to your podcast about the explosion, I called my mom for more of our family's information. Shouldn't have a whole lot to add about ten year old Maxine and not knowing much more than I do myself, but I should tell me more about the explosion than I had heard before. Apparently, being nearly nearly thirty years old, I am no longer to ten or an age for these things. Her account was that about three hundred people died and an explosion at the school caused by a natural gas link in the basement. She added that this one horrific day in a small East Texas town as the reason natural gas now has a smell, and she also mentioned that boards were put down to help smooth out the path to the rebel for trucks that were coming to help, only later to realize that some of the dead had been under those boards. And the other than these things my mother referred to me, My mother referred me to her mother for more. So I've emailed a link to your show to my grandmother along with her request for more information about the explosion. She was still an infant living with her parents and Henderson at the time, but she is an excellent family historian, so I hope for some insight and that she will allow me to share it with y'all. Before I finished up, I have a question about a small detail in the episode. My mom mentioned a basement at the school. I interrupted her to point out the oddity of such an idea. I grew up in Central Texas, where the idea of a basement is laughable. The limestone is too close to the surface of the soil for basements to be cost if I theyve in most situations the state capital nonwithstanding, But having visited East Texas so often throughout my life, the idea of a basement in the school in New London seems odd too. I've never heard of a basements in Rusk County before, so I take a particular note when y'all said that was the space below a hollow floor where the gas accumulated. At the introduction of Your Texas Monthly source that interview survivors also calls it a basement. Haven't looked through all the show notes for the episode yet, but I'm wondering why you did not call it a basement. Was it an actual basement? Is was the basement a word used by people in the region to describe something along the lines of an enclosed crawl space, or wasn't something else? Based on y'all's description, I'm picturing something that is essentially the opposite of a drop ceiling. I hope it is not as odd as what I mentioned. Uh. And then she goes on to um say that she'll let us know if her grandfather has any good tidbits. UM, and thanks us both for the work we do on the podcast. Thank you, Madeleine. Uh. I wanted to read that for two reasons. One is the personal connection of the other is the basement. The idea that the explosions started in a basement is all over the place among survivor accounts, But there is so much contradictory detail about what the school's structure was actually like, uh, that I don't think we can answer the question of whether there was really a full basement. Like I think of a basement is a thing you could walk down to on stairs that has like an a full ceiling above your head. Right, I'm gesturing versus like a crawl. Right, So it's even in the more detailed descriptions of the school, the description is like not necessarily that there was something that was a full basement the entire length of the school. Like, it's just very hard to pen down and confusing, and possibly if I like went to Rest County and dug through old blueprints of the school, that question could be conclusively answered to be well. And it also gets into the semantics of the word basement right right, like what somebody would call a seller, or someone else might call a basement, someone else might call across space. So literally looked this up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Uh so, yeah, it's unclear, and like there are a lot of things in the survivor accounts that seem to have been picked up and have become part of the collective memory, but are definitely not what happened. Um, Like a news a news station posted about the uh the anniversary of the tragedy, and somebody tagged our podcast page, which is why I even saw it. And there was some there were people commenting that were like, yes, I was there that day. I was in the gym with my mom because of the gas smell, but there definitely was no gas smell. So like we have this combination of the fact that the building was completely obliterated and had been built almost you know, more than eighty years ago at this point, and the most of the folks alive today who still remember it were small children at time, so I could not tell you whether it was really a basement. UH. If if you would like to write to us about this or any other podcasts or I don't know, send us a scan of the blueprints. We originally New London School or History podcast at how stuff works dot com. We're also on Facebook dot at Facebook dot com, slash miss in History on Twitter at miss in History. That miss in History is basically our name all over social media, so that's also where you will find our tumbler and our pinterest in our Instagram. You can come to our parent company's website, which is how stuff works dot com to find all kinds of information about whatever your heart desires. And you can come to our website, which is missed in history dot com, where you will find uh an archive of every episode that has ever existed on the podcast. You will find the show notes for all of our podcasts older ones are separate posts, but newer ones are part the episode player page, and that is where you will find more information about the book that I referenced earlier. So you can do all of that and a whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or mrs in history dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com.