As such, they embodied a combination of commercial and patriotic aspirations: the merchants and adventurers who founded them wished to make personal profit for themselves, but they also generally shared the larger goal of securing economic self-sufficiency for Britain. With the exception of the Puritan settlements in New England (undertaken to escape religious persecution), these early colonies were plantation settlements that in certain respects resembled those the Spanish had already established. During the seventeenth century, however, the British succeeded in establishing colonies in the Americas that would provide the foundation of a world empire. Great Britain entered the competition near the end of the sixteenth century, but early British attempts to found overseas settlements faltered. In the sixteenth century, Spain still dominated European colonization of the New World. Events in History at the Time of the Novel Plantation settlements While she also wrote poetry, Behn is remembered today primarily for Oroonoko, one of the earliest examples of a new literary form-the novel. The best known is The Rover (1677), which, like her other plays, features the intrigue and bawdiness common in Restoration drama. She began writing to pay her debts, in the end producing from 15 to 20 plays that enjoyed notable success on the London stage. Returning penniless to London and having failed to persuade the government to reimburse her for the money she had spent on gathering intelligence, she seems to have served some time in debtors’ prison.

Later in that same decade, she acted as a spy in the Netherlands on behalf of the newly restored King Charles II. In the 1660s she may (as she claims in Oroonoko) have traveled to Surinam, a British plantation colony on the Atlantic coast of South America. She is believed to have been born Aphra Johnson in a small town near Canterbury, England, in July 1640. Little is known about the enigmatic Aphra Behn other than the fact that she was the first Englishwoman to write professionally. Captured after leading a slave revolt, he nobly endures torture and mutilation before being executed.Įvents in History at the Time of the Novel Oroonoko, a young African prince, is enslaved and transported from West Africa to an English plantation in Surinam. Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave: A True HistoryĪ short novel set in Africa and South America in 1663-64 published in London in 1688.

Oroonoko text