Oroonoko

First published in 1688, Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave is a remarkable early work of English prose fiction, recounting the fate of an African prince betrayed by European traders and transported into slavery in Surinam. Oroonoko, a noble warrior and devoted lover, is separated from Imoinda, the woman he loves, and forced into a colonial world in which honour, authority and humanity are repeatedly tested. Drawing on the conventions of romance, the language of eyewitness testimony and the unsettling realities of colonial exploitation, Behn creates a narrative whose admiration for its protagonist sits uneasily alongside the assumptions of its age.

The novella occupies a contested but essential place in the history of English literature, raising enduring questions about slavery, race, political legitimacy and the relationship between liberty and power. Its portrayal of an enslaved African hero has made it central to debates about the beginnings of the English novel and the development of abolitionist thought, even as its own perspective reveals the contradictions of seventeenth-century colonial culture. A pioneering woman of letters who earned her living through writing, Behn brings both theatrical immediacy and moral complexity to a story that remains difficult, compelling and historically consequential.

From the book

I was myself an eye-witness to a great part of what you will find here set down.

— Aphra Behn, Oroonoko

On Oroonoko

The character of Oronoko is one of the most noble and firm characters that I have encountered in history and even in novels.

— Élie-Catherine Fréron, L’Année littéraire (1756), translated from the French