Conning the “Overseers”: Women’s Illicit Work in Behn’s “The Adventure of the Black Lady”
Ferguson, Margaret
Early Modern Culture, No. 5 (2006)
Abstract
Having spent some fifteen years thinking (off and on) about Aphra Behn’s theory and practice of literacy in the context of her fictional — or “factional” — representations of white English women working with words in colonial settings,1 I’m now at the early stages of rethinking Behn’s writings across several genres for a book provisionally called “The Illicit I (Eye).” So far, the book lacks a sub-title further specifying its subject/object of study, although I came up with a bland post-colon phrase when I applied for grants last year. The granting agencies all said no, as, evidently, did many of the aristocratic patrons from whom Behn sought financial support for her books. Grant-free, I’m hoping here to think anew, and harder, about my project’s analytic focus and about my own investments in the figure who commonly but by no means simply went by the names of “Aphra” and “Behn.”
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