Besides a number of letters and poems, her literary productions include a translation of Fontenelle’s “Plurality of Worlds,” and a paraphrase on Van Dale’s “De Oraculis Ethnicorum.”  Her plays met with some success, but were characterized by a licentiousness which won for her the title of “the female Wycherley,” a fact, which, on account of her sex, called down upon her a general and well-deserved condemnation.  Two other productions, of which the nature is sufficiently indicated by their titles, were “The Lover’s Watch; or the Art of making Love:  being Rules for Courtship for every Hour of the Day and Night”; and “The Ladies Looking Glass to dress themselves by; or the whole Art of charming all Mankind.”

It was on Mrs. Behn’s return from the West Indies that, being introduced at court, she related to Charles the Second the terrible fate of the noble slave Oroonoko.  At the solicitation of the king, she put her narrative into the form of a novel, which obtained a large circulation, and was dramatized by Southern in his tragedy of the same name.  “Oroonoko” is worthy of notice as one of the earliest attempts on the part of an English novelist to deal with characters which had come under the writer’s observation in actual life.  It is still more important on account of the presence within it of a didactic purpose; a characteristic which for good or for evil has been a prominent feature of the English novel.  Sir Thomas More had made use of fiction in the sixteenth century to urge his ideas of political and social reforms.  Bunyan, more than a century later, used the same means to promulgate his conception of Christian life.  While English narrative fiction was still in its first youth, Mrs. Behn protested against the evils of the slave trade through the medium of a story which may be considered a forerunner of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.”

To interest the public in a distant country or an abstract principle, the novel is the most effective literary means.  A treatise on the slave trade by Mrs. Behn, however strong and truthful, would have met with the little attention which is accorded to the sufferings of a distant and unknown people.  But the novel has the advantage over the treatise, that it deals with the particular and not the general, with the individual and not the nation.  It can place before the reader a limited number of persons; it can interest his mind and heart in their characters, lives, and fate; and by subjecting them to the horrors of the evil to be depicted, excite through commiseration for their sufferings a hatred of the cause which inflicted them.  To such a use the novel has often been put, at too frequent a sacrifice of its artistic merit.  To excite indignation against the results of the slave trade, Mrs. Behn took the special instance of Oroonoko.  She endowed the African slave with beauty of person and nobility of character.  She gave him tastes and qualities of a kind to attract the interest of a European reader.  She added a description of his wife Imoinda, dwelling on the details of her beauty and charms.  By a passionate relation of the amatory scenes which occurred between Oroonoko and his wife, she touched a key particularly calculated to excite contemporary English sympathy.  Finally, by telling the story of the cruel wrongs inflicted on the slaves, she aroused a natural indignation against the system which could entail such evil results.