Arguably the best-known female writer of the seventeenth century, Aphra Behn (1640–1689) was a prolific and successful playwright and an innovator in developing fictional prose genres and translations. She was, however, first and foremost a poet. It is in her poetry, the smallest category of her oeuvre, that she speaks most revealingly about herself as an author, particularly in her verse epistles. In the poem quoted above she describes her mind “Compos’d […] of Softer Love” and a poetic style of “gentle Numbers.” Rather than merely a decorous pose, these words are precisely chosen to characterize her gender and her art. Aware of her distinction as a female poet and the cultural alignment between the feminine, softness and love, she rather boldly claims a Lucretian origin for her mind composed of love atoms, and she describes her aesthetic of smooth versification and language, the “gentle numbers.” Her self-description has meaning for this quantitative study, as it is likewise concerned with love and numbers, though of a slightly different kind.

Using concordance data on a verified corpus of Behn's literary works, Quantitative Literary Analysis of the Works of Aphra Behn: Words of Passion achieves several goals. First, it provides a statistical overview of all Behn's literary works to get a complete sense of the scope of her writings; the relative size of her poetry, drama and prose and the titles within those categories; the favored words and word patterns within genres and subgenres, and the words and word patterns she prefers as compared to her peers. Second, the book situates Behn's writing within a critical history and uses the statistical data to verify, supplement and redirect critical judgments.