SOURCE: "Beyond Incest: Gender and the Politics of Transgression in Aphra Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister," in Rereading Aphra Behn: History, Theory, and Criticism, edited by Heidi Hutner, University Press of Virginia, 1993, pp. 151-86.

Below, Pollak presents a detailed study of Behn's Love-Letters, contending that "Behn's narrative effectively displaces the conceptual grounds of a heterosexual matrix of assumptions that encodes incestuous desire as a form of freedom from patriarchal law."

Expressly incestuous and deeply embedded in the politics of regicide and political rebellion, Aphra Behn's Love-Letters between a Nobleman and His Sister is also a text insistently preoccupied with questions of gender, identity, and representation. Published in three parts between 1684 and 1687, Behn's novel is based loosely on an affair between Ford, Lord Grey of Werke, and his wife's sister, Lady Henrietta Berkeley, a scandal that broke in London in 1682, when Lady Berkeley's father published an...