Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave

Published in 1688, Oroonoko is one of the earliest English novels and a foundational work of abolitionist literature. Aphra Behn—the first professional woman writer in English—draws on her own time in the colony of Surinam to tell the story of Oroonoko, a young African prince of extraordinary beauty and honour. After falling in love with the beautiful Imoinda, he is betrayed by his own grandfather and then by a treacherous English captain who captures him into slavery. Renamed Caesar on a Surinam plantation, he discovers Imoinda has been enslaved there too. Their reunion leads to a doomed rebellion and one of the most harrowing endings in seventeenth-century fiction. Part romance, part travel narrative, part political protest, Oroonoko is a work that still startles with its moral clarity about the cruelty of the slave trade.