From Recovery to Restoration: Aphra Behn and Feminist Bibliography

In the years since initial feminist recovery efforts, scholars have turned their focus from how to uncover lost voices to how to keep those voices from slipping back to obscurity. Early efforts were driven by what pioneering scholar Janet Todd labels an admirable "enthusiasm for cultural change" that for all its substantive accomplishments may have "rushed into premature and erroneous generalizations."¹ In this article, I focus on generalizations about the bibliographic history of early modern women's authorship and publication. I argue that returning to these key building blocks enables scholars to restore women's place in textual production and perhaps prevent further "Cycles of Forgetting" that lead to the repeated obscuring of women's lives and works.² As a case study, consideration of Aphra Behn's engagement in commercial writing demonstrates how feminist bibliography can dramatically shift narratives of women writers and alter the questions scholars are prepared to ask of these writers and their texts.

Bibliography is the foundation of literary research in that it gives us data to analyze using standardized practices, fostering analysis of authorship, attribution, textual production, and reception. Historically, bibliography has focused on the experience of a select few white, male authors such as William Shakespeare, John Donne, and John Milton. Because of this early and sustained interest, these figures have the benefit of variorum projects and extensive descriptive and analytical bibliographies. The result is that minute variants in Shakespeare's First Folio are logged, but women writers are fortunate if they have a thorough enumerative bibliography, access to their works, or serious consideration of how material mediation affects textual reception.

Because of this ideological inheritance, bibliographers who work on female subjects and their texts face significant hurdles. Feminist bibliographers must translate and adapt models based on male authors to avoid ahistorically evaluating women writers based on exceptional male standards. Women are also more likely to have haphazard or woefully sparse documentation of their records. There are problems even for near-canonical figures such as Aphra Behn and Eliza Haywood, who both have substantial bibliographies of their known works.³ Patrick Spedding, in his 2004 bibliography of Haywood, laments how surprisingly difficult it is to find information about this prolific eighteenth-century writer:

Bibliographical studies that deal with male writers of Haywood's importance from the eighteenth century rarely experience the problems faced here. … The lack of biographical, bibliographical and critical studies has exacerbated the two-fold problem that faces every bibliographer: establishing the author's canon and distinguishing editions and issues of each title.⁴

Spedding was able to use digital databases and tools to augment what he could not locate in person, much like scholars who attempted to recover early modern women's writing without the bibliographical resources available for scholarship on canonical male writers.⁵ His bibliography usefully addresses publication practices, copyright, and compensation—issues that are usually not reported with lists of an author's works. His project benefited from advances in digital research tools and the growth of book history: the former of which allowed him to view digital replicas of obscure works and the latter has made publishing history and book trade practices a more mainstream discourse. Even with his bibliography's somewhat generous definition of attribution,⁶ it has substantially increased scholars' ability to track the value and popularity of Haywood's texts from their initial publication through the eighteenth century and beyond. It has also clarified when booksellers' title pages have led scholars astray about the scope of Haywood's imprints.⁷

As Spedding's work illustrates, advances in digital research tools like Early English Books Online (EEBO) and the digitization of the English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) have democratized certain methods of bibliographic scholarship. It is now possible for more researchers to engage in bibliographic analyses of women writers, to return to the "generalizations" Todd identified as part of initial recovery efforts, and to assess how women writers may not have been accorded the same level of analysis as their male counterparts. To see how these approaches can alter our narratives of women's authorship...