ABSTRACT
This chapter closely examines three early novels with female protagonists who commit, or attempt to commit murder: Aphra Behn's The History of the Nun, or the Fair Vow-Breaker and The Fair Jilt, or The History of Prince Tarquin and Miranda; and Delarivier Manley's The Wife's Resentment. The History of the Nun traces the fall of Isabella de Vallery, paragon of virtue, into bigamy and double homicide. It negotiates party, sexual, and textual politics in a skillful and subtle investigation of personal and political agency in which the boundaries between subject and object and the complicated negotiations of power are continually shifting. The Fair Jilt is a violent female fantasy of unleashed female desire that refuses to be contained by sexual or textual boundaries. While Behn's novels destabilize the very category of femininity itself, The Wife's Resentment remains vested in the notion of feminine virtue that is defined by virginity and chastity.
