Yet for a comparatively short tale, Oroonoko has had a distracting variety of readings. Current attention to women's writing and to matters of race have now combined to make it, for all its pell-mell sentences, perhaps the most widely reprinted and studied prose tale to come from early modern England. After interest in her writing revived, beginning around 1900, it gradually gained notice as a literary novelty, even a small classic in its own right. When her name and writings sank into disrepute, Oroonoko remained the work for which she was most steadily remembered. 56) - Behn produced a story so original and so powerful that it started a procession of Oroonoko-like figures in stories, plays, poems, and popular news reports. Though writing in evident haste - 'I never rested my Pen a Moment for Thought' (iii, p. Her closest friends include Oroonoko and Imoinda, who often dine at her table.Oroonoko continues to strike new readers with its sheer historical surprise: The first English woman author to have had a full professional career, nearing the end of her life, set down an unexampled tale of a black African prince betrayed into slavery in a New World English colony.

She describes her health as poor, and is very sensitive to all kinds of odors. The narrator admires the foods and customs of the ethnic groups she comes into contact with, and in general she has a keen sense of adventure. While the narrator abhors how Oroonoko is treated, she never admits that she has a problem with the institution of slavery itself-the main injustice she decries is that a natural king like Oroonoko should be treated so disrespectfully. While she highly esteems Oroonoko, there is a sense that he is the exception, not the rule, when it comes to African. She sees these “natives” as close descendants of Adam and Eve before the Fall of Man, but her opinions toward black Africans seems to be a bit murkier. For the most part, the narrator is open-minded (for her time) and not entirely bigoted in her opinions of the native peoples of the European colonies. Almost the whole of Oroonoko is told in the narrator’s voice and from her perspective. The narrator is a female Englishwoman, and possibly the direct voice of the author, Aphra Behn, who lived in Suriname for a while and may have had similar experiences to the narrator.

Aphra behn oroonoko full text