This chapter stems from my involvement in the new complete edition of Aphra Behn, being published by Cambridge University Press (beginning with vol. 4, ed. Rachel Adcock et al., 2021). I want to look, in particular, at how Behn’s prose fiction was curated and transmitted after her death. But on a slightly broader scale, I also want to explore some ideas about the editorial tradition for Behn’s work in general. During her life, Behn went through waves and troughs of comfort and poverty, success and neglect. By the time of her death in April 1689, the highly successful playwright of the 1670s and early 1680s had fallen on hard times, famously begging her publisher, Jacob Tonson, for a top-up payment for her poetry: “good deare Mr. Tonson, let it be five pound more … I have been without getting so long that I am just upon the point of breaking, especially since a body has no credit at the playhouse as we used to have, fifty or 60 deep.

Epic and romance

This chapter deals with the least read and, in some cases, least studied writing of the period of the English Revolution. In recent years, literary scholars have been drawn towards radical writing of all kinds, in part following on from historians and in part due to a salutary change in political and cultural sympathy. The two obviously canonized writers of the period, Milton and Marvell, are readily accommodated to this radical bias. Their dominance is hardly challenged by the Royalist sentiments of the 'B' list of 'cavalier lyricists' (Herrick, Lovelace, Suckling, Waller) and Anglican religious poets (Vaughan, Traherne), still less by two other kinds of Royalist writing which have been all but invisible in literary discussion of the period: epic poetry, although this has at least never been entirely invisible, and romance, which has pretty much vanished from the sight of all but a handful of scholars. Recently Timothy Raylor has pointed to the limitations of our understanding of cavalier culture, in comparison to 'the sophisticated appreciation we now have of the ideological complexities of those traditionally labelled “Puritans”'.

There is a significant methodological problem which has to be addressed before any ‘history’ of critical ideas about prose fiction in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries can proceed. During the period in question, no writer saw works like Philip Sidney's Arcadia (1590), Thomas Nashe's Unfortunate traveller (1594), Margaret Cavendish's Blazing world (1666) or William Congreve's Incognita (1692) as belonging to the same genre. Therefore, when we consider issues such as debates over appropriate style in prose fiction, or controversies about characterization in romance, it is important to remember that such issues never extended to any conception of a genre constructed by the twentieth century in response to the modern obsession with the novel.

Notions of the novel and its origins cast a cloud over considerations of both the nature of prose fiction in the period preceding the eighteenth century and theoretical ideas from the earlier period which might in some way have anticipated the work of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. A considerable body of recent theoretical writing has revisited and refocused the thesis of Ian Watt's influential Rise of the novel. The work of Lennard Davis, Michael McKeon, J. Paul Hunter, and Robert Mayer has changed our ideas of the novel's prehistory, but all these writers look back at the earlier period in order to understand more clearly the developmental model proposed initially by Watt, projecting a form of teleological determinism which hampers any chance of looking at pre-eighteenth-century fiction from within its own concerns. (Exactly the same problem occurs in A. J. Tieje's work on early prose fiction, despite his greater focus on actual works of fiction from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.)