This new edition of Oroonoko is based on the first printed edition of 1688, and includes a chronology, bibliography and notes. The novel also reveals Behn’s ambiguous attitude to African slavery – while she favoured it as a means to strengthen England’s power, her powerful and moving work conveys its injustice and brutality. Inspired by Aphra Behn’s visit to Surinam, Oroonoko (1688) reflects the author’s romantic view of Native Americans as simple, superior peoples 'in the first state of innocence, before men knew how to sin’. Oroonoko’s noble bearing soon wins the respect of his English captors, but his struggle for freedom brings about his destruction.

When Prince Oroonoko’s passion for the virtuous Imoinda arouses the jealousy of his grandfather, the lovers are cast into slavery and transported from Africa to the colony of Surinam. In her larger project of recuperating Behn's literary reputation, Mühlbach privileges the white European woman's subjectivity against the background of the black woman as ‘other’.'We are bought and sold like apes or monkeys, to be the sport of women, fools, and cowards, and the support of rogues’. Although Mühlbach employs a more modern anti-racist discourse than Behn, Aphra's position remains implicated with the colonial order, and while the black woman Imoinda gains in agency, she lacks the autonomous subjectivity of Aphra and Oroonoko. Drawing on post-colonial cultural criticism, this essay examines Mühlbach's alterations of Behn's Oroonoko, focusing on the racial and gendered dynamics of power in the white female protagonist's relationship to the black slave couple and to male colonial authority. Mühlbach's text asserts a specifically female authorial legitimacy and challenges male dominance in social relations and in literary culture. She adapts Behn's slave story within the historical context of nineteenth-century abolitionism, and she reinterprets Behn's biography and controversial literary reputation, transforming Behn into a respectable female literary predecessor.

In her novel Aphra Behn (1849), the German author Luise Mühlbach joins these disparate strands of Behn reception.

England's first professional woman writer, Behn left a literary legacy divided between recognition of Oroonoko by abolitionists and rejection of her reputation for indecency. Many critics consider Aphra Behn's novella Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave (1688) the first anti-slavery narrative.

Aphra behn oroonoko full text