Violence and Awe

A prolific and successful poet, playwright, and novelist, Aphra Behn (1640–1689) holds the distinction of being the first English woman to earn a living off the proceeds of her writing. Her popularity among her contemporaries carried over into the eighteenth century, and her collected works went through eight editions by 1735. Behn’s prose works eventually fell out of favor with scholars—the writer of the entry on Behn in the Dictionary of National Biography calls her prose works “decidedly less meritorious than her drama and the best of her poems.” Yet, this judgment obscures the fact that it was Behn’s Oroonoko, a novella, that contributed more than any other single work to the formation of her literary reputation among her contemporaries. (The renown of Behn’s Oroonoko increased in 1695 when it was transformed into a successful play by Thomas Southerner.) In recent decades, Behn’s Oroonoko has once again become popular with readers, and has generated a new body of criticism and scholarship. An indication of Oroonoko’s success with today’s readers and its increasing status in the canon of English literature is its recent inclusion in the sixth edition of the Norton Anthology of British Literature (Vol. I).