This project began in the early days of 2020 as a short, straightforward snapshot of Aphra Behn's complete oeuvre in statistical terms: length of works, most frequent words (MFW), n-grams, collocates and keywords in comparison to a general reference and a set of peer works. It aimed to be experimental, and it was intended to open the canon of Behn's literary works to more analytical and empirical forms of study. Quantitative Literary Analysis of the Works of Aphra Behn began with a desire to bring digital humanities into literary criticism, to discover if it could, in fact, enhance our understanding and appreciation of literature beyond what is possible in diachronic reading and scholarship less supported by digital means. The events of 2020 changed the direction of the project. The impact of the worldwide pandemic combined with professional leave afforded me an unprecedented period alone with my computer and books, and being engaged in the experimental process, I wrote the book twice. The first draft snapshot provides the bones of the argument, but consistent threads of literary analysis and interpretation now overlay and fill out the structure. The third version of the manuscript comes in response to reader reports, which were generous and helpful. They asked for fewer data and more argument and a clearer explanation of the relationship between quantitative analysis and literary criticism. The final book is rich in close readings and interpretative methods.

In the third iteration of the book, I have removed much of the original framework in discussions of digital humanities research, corpus construction and descriptive statistical data. For those interested precisely in these threads, I refer to a white paper that I’ve written on Developing a Method for Quantitative Literary Analysis, available with the data from the research in the open-access repository.

Significantly, for my work, the quantitative and the discursive scholarship needs to work together to be most effective. Encouraged by the support and feedback of my on-line writing partners, Catherine Ingrassia and Jennifer Keith, I integrated the critical arguments already available to explain Behn's works in my searches and queries. The accumulation of Behn scholarship is immense.