Oroonoko - Aphra Behn, 1688.

“All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn...for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.”
Virginia Woolf

Oroonoko, Aphra Behn’s most studied novel, was particularly revolutionary; while its publication in 1688 is widely heralded as the birth of the English novel, a black protagonist and female author are surely the more staggering aspects of Behn’s glorious portrait of an African prince enslaved and disparaging representation of white supremacy in the quickly expanding British empire.

African tribal prince Oroonoko, who the author claimed to exist, is unanimously adored by all that meet him. Behn ceaselessly praises the man’s physique, appearance, character and heart throughout, and it is such attributes which highlight the injustice of his fate, as he and his maiden lover Imoinda are captured as slaves by British traders from Surinam in a radical account of the barbarism of slavery.

Aphra Behn is known to have worked as a spy under King Charles II, however debate rages as to whether she actually visited the South American colony. While her descriptions of tropical landscape and indigenous people are generally accurate, minor descrepancies are suggested. The majority of Europeans named in the novel were named as true contemporaneous figures, a somewhat peculiar example of poetic license to use if Behn had not travelled extensively, as few Western characters escape positively. One Englishman who escapes without condemnation in Oroonoko is George Marten, a loyal Cromwellian, while Royalist colonists appear malevolent and sadistic. Behn herself was a famously militant supporter of the monarchy, thus her coupling of tyrannical brutality with political ideology unquestionably not in line with her own seems bizarre.

A sentimentalised love story which established amatory fiction as a precursor to the modern novel, or a cruel reminder of British colonial cruelty in a time of social and scientific turbulence? Oroonoko is unquestionably, and, most importantly, a valuable representation of each.