Oroonoko

First published in 1688, Oroonoko follows the tragic love story a charismatic African prince and his beloved Imoinda. The eponymous hero is tricked into slavery and sold to European colonists in Surinam. Behn’s moving and deeply empathetic tale is structured as a first-person account of Oroonoko’s life, love, rebellion, and execution.

This Warbler Classics edition includes an historically illuminating article by George Jay Smith from 1925 and an essay that provides context for Oroonoko, Behn’s most famous story, by Janet Todd, whose biography Aphra Behn: A Secret Life was published in 2017.

Aphra Behn (1640–1689) is often cited as the first known professional female writer. She was an English playwright, poet, translator, essayist, and fiction writer who pioneered the modern novel. Her stories appeared eighty years before Richardson’s Pamela (1740), which is commonly called the first English novel.

George Jay Smith (1866–1938) earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy from Harvard University and taught English language and literature at Columbia University.

Janet Todd is a former President of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, and Emerita Professor of English Literature at the University of Aberdeen. She is the author of Aphra Behn: A Secret Life (2017).

“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 is the first humanitarian novel in English.”
—Wilbur L. Cross