SOURCE: "Fact and Fiction in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko" in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 20, No. 1, Spring, 1988, pp. 1–15.

In the essay below, Rogers argues that Oroonoko is a creative treatment of facts derived from Behn's personal experiences.

In 1913 Ernest Bernbaum gleefully exposed borrowings and inaccuracies in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko so as to show that Behn could not have been an eyewitness to the events, as her first-person narrator claimed.¹ In accordance with the general tendency of male-dominated criticism at the time to sneer at pioneering women writers, he presented this as evidence of personal untruthfulness in the author. In reaction, Behn's two recent feminist biographers, Maureen Duffy (1977) and Angeline Goreau (1980), have accepted the tale as reliable autobiography. Both interpretations are too extreme, and both distract from Behn's actual artistic achievement: imaginative creation building on a foundation of fact, which probably included personal experience. This was, of course, no more...