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

SOURCE: "Romantic Love-Prose Fiction," in Virtue of Necessity: English Women's Writing, 1646–1688, Virago Press Limited, 1988, pp. 85–101.

… Aphra Behn's stories map out a world of female possibilities and limits: a bleak world, since the options open to her heroines are shown to be few indeed.²⁴ It is rescued from despair only by the sparkling courage and daring of her women protagonists, who with great determination negotiate their way through a universe where men have all the power.

Her most well-known story, Oroonoko, sits uneasily in my account of female romance in other respects, but it nonetheless exhibits some central features of the genre. The tale's two main protagonists are startlingly beautiful, and they maintain an undying love despite opposition from a tyrannical parent. The heroine's bravery in battle and her subjection to the...