Oroonoko: An Authoritative Text Historical Backgrounds Criticism

This long-awaited Norton Critical Edition of Aphra Behn’s best-known and most influential work makes available the original 1688 text, the only text published in her lifetime.

Aphra Behn flourished in the cosmopolitan world of the London playhouse and the court. It was she, Virginia Woolf wrote, "who earned [women] the right to speak their minds."

Joanna Lipking is Lecturer in English at Northwestern University, where she has taught since 1979. A Columbia Ph.D., she writes on women’s emergence in print culture. Her articles and reviews on Aphra Behn and other early women writers appear in Studies in the Eighteenth Century, The Eighteenth Century: A Current Bibliography, and the recent Cambridge University Press collection, Aphra Behn Studies.