SOURCE: Vermillion, Mary. “Buried Heroism: Critiques of Female Authorship in Southerne's Adaptation of Oroonoko.” Restoration 16, no. 1 (fall 1992): 28-37.

In the following essay, Vermillion argues that Southerne's stage adaptation of Aphra Behn's novel Oroonoko betrays his antagonism toward female writers.

While critics have long compared Thomas Southerne's 1695 play, Oroonoko, to its source, Aphra Behn's 1688 novel of the same name, no one has examined the problematics of a male playwright borrowing from England's first professional woman writer.¹. This borrowing occurred during the period when women as a group first began openly writing for money, most of them, including Behn, entering the literary market as dramatists.² Southerne's attitude toward this emerging female authorship can be discerned by examining his most substantial revision of Behn's novel, an addition of a comic subplot in which two desperate English women hunt for husbands in Surinam. Recent commentators have suggested that this subplot allows Southerne...