Telling Untold Stories: Philippa Gregory's A Respectable Trade and David Dabydeen's A Harlot's Progress

Published within five years of each other, Philippa Gregory's "A Respectable Trade" and David Dabydeen's "A Harlot's Progress" offer two very different kinds of late twentieth-century meditations on racial relations as they unfolded in the eighteenth century and as they continue to unfold in the present. While Gregory locates the estrangement of black from white and woman from man in an originary cause--commodification--Dabydeen is always aware of its own status as commodified object, never asserting an originary cause.