SOURCE: "New Evidence of the Realism of Mrs. Behn's Oroonoko," in Bulletin of the New York Public Library, Vol. 74, January-December, 1970, pp. 437–44.

In the following essay, Hargreaves addresses the question of Behn's claims of travel to Surinam, arguing that new evidence suggests she did travel there.

In 1688 Mrs Aphra Behn, England's first professional woman writer, published a prose tale entitled Oroonoko, or, The Royal Slave. Her use of first-person narration provided an immediacy and verisimilitude which captured the fancy of the reading public, and the work has remained in print through centuries to the present day. It was a superior piece of writing, and scholars and critics eventually assigned it a position of importance as an early example of the use of realism in the developing forms of prose fiction. Realism has been defined in several ways, but in this case it is clear that much of the realistic...