![]() Over three centuries, the exceptional woman author and her singular black hero seem to have stood on radically shifting grounds. Yet for a comparatively short tale, Oroonoko has had a distracting variety of readings. Current attention to women's writing and to matters of race have now combined to make it, for all its pell-mell sentences, perhaps the most widely reprinted and studied prose tale to come from early modern England. ![]() ![]() After interest in her writing revived, beginning around 1900, it gradually gained notice as a literary novelty, even a small classic in its own right. When her name and writings sank into disrepute, Oroonoko remained the work for which she was most steadily remembered. 56) - Behn produced a story so original and so powerful that it started a procession of Oroonoko-like figures in stories, plays, poems, and popular news reports. Though writing in evident haste - ' I never rested my Pen a Moment for Thought' (iii, p. ![]() Oroonoko continues to strike new readers with its sheer historical surprise: the first English woman author to have had a full professional career, nearing the end of her life, set down an unexampled tale of a black African prince betrayed into slavery in a New World English colony. ![]()
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