The plot follows how he struggles between love and loyalty when his grandfather, the King of Coramantien, thwarts the love between Oroonoko and the love of his life, Imoinda, solely for his lust toward the same woman. Told by the participant narrator in a female voice in the seventeenth century, Oroonoko is about an escaping slave, Oroonoko, who is born a prince and heir of the African country of Coramantien. The narrator of the story, who is generally identified with Behn, wants to save him but “as a woman and onlooker, she can do little except tell his tale to the world” (Todd). The story centers a black hero named Oroonoko, who is kidnapped from West Africa, enslaved and taken to Surinam. The main European characters mentioned in the story are historical figures, such as deputy governor William Byam is being made into a villain (Todd). When the Second Anglo-Dutch War ended in 1667, Surinam was ceded to the Dutch-“a loss that Behn laments in Oroonoko” (“Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave”). Oroonoko was written based on her experiences in Antwerp, Belgium and Surinam, South America, where she worked for Charles II’s government as a spy in the 1660s (Todd). By breaking cultural barriers, Behn served as the literary role model for female writers for many decades to come (“Aphra Behn”).Īs revenue from the theatre diminished in the 1680s, Behn shifted her career focus from playwriting to prose writing which was fast becoming more profitable with the advent of a new genre: the novel. Much of her work, therefore, was published anonymously. She wrote novels, short stories, poems, and numerous plays, despite criticisms and prejudice against female writers. Unrewarded, she began writing to support herself. After her husband died, she was employed by King Charles II in secret service in 1666. Though classified as a novel, some say Oroonoko is a cultural hybrid as it blends the genres of “mythology, reportage, travelogue, and memoir” (“Oroonoko”).Īcclaimed as the first English woman to make her living as a writer, Restoration novelist, poet, and playwright Aphra Behn’s origin is mostly unknown in part because she may have intentionally obscured her early life. Wikimedia Commons.įirst published in 1688, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko is one of the earliest English novels and has been lauded as “the first humanitarian novel in English” (Cross 20). “Hanout of the 1776 performance of Oroonoko,” by unknown artist, 1776.

Author of 1688 novel oroonoko