ABSTRACT
Critics have long argued that the novels of Daniel Defoe revolve around precision accounting. Yet if one considers fiction written just a few decades earlier, notions like precise value and purchasing power become puzzlingly anachronistic. Why is that so? Part of the answer lies in the work of Aphra Behn, an especially interesting early respondent to certain important economic changes that were taking place in Britain in the latter part of the seventeenth century. As will soon become clear, understanding "accounting" in Behn is crucial to understanding accounting in the early realist novel. And because any discourse of accounting is overwhelmingly about the larger issue of valuation, we will be turning to the discourse of economics to define what is valuable.
