Interest in Oroonoko has increased since the 1970s, with critics arguing that Behn is the foremother of British female writers, and that Oroonoko is a crucial text in the history of the novel. Published less than a year before she died, Oroonoko is sometimes described as one of the first novels in English.

She began writing prose fiction in the 1680s, probably in response to the consolidation of theatres that led to a reduced need for new plays. īehn, often cited as the first known professional female writer, was a successful playwright, poet, translator and essayist. Behn's text is a first-person account of Oroonoko's life, love, rebellion, and execution.

The eponymous hero is an African prince from Coramantien who is tricked into slavery and sold to European colonists in Surinam where he meets the narrator. Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave is a work of prose fiction by Aphra Behn (1640–1689), published in 1688 by William Canning and reissued with two other fictions later that year. The scene of the last part of his adventures lies in a colony in America, called Surinam, in the West Indies.Oroonoko: or, the Royal Slave. But we who were perfectly charmed with the character of this great man were curious to gather every circumstance of his life. I was myself an eye-witness to a great part of what you will find here set down and what I could not be witness of, I received from the mouth of the chief actor in this history, the hero himself, who gave us the whole transactions of his youth: and though I shall omit, for brevity's sake, a thousand little accidents of his life, which, however pleasant to us, where history was scarce and adventures very rare, yet might prove tedious and heavy to my reader, in a world where he finds diversions for every minute, new and strange.

I do not pretend, in giving you the history of this Royal Slave, to entertain my reader with adventures of a feigned hero, whose life and fortunes fancy may manage at the poet's pleasure nor in relating the truth, design to adorn it with any accidents but such as arrived in earnest to him: and it shall come simply into the world, recommended by its own proper merits and natural intrigues there being enough of reality to support it, and to render it diverting, without the addition of invention.

Aphra behn the royal slave