Edited by Joanna Lipking. Women before Austen - Aphra Behn was playwright, spy, and world traveller in Restoration England. A novel before Defoe, Oroonoko combines contemporaneous European myths and facts to tell the story, and definitely center the story, of a heroic African couple caught in the horrors of the early trans-Atlantic slave trade. The original text of Oroonoko as published in 1688 is reproduced here with a collection of writings. Historical documents include 17th and 18th century writings about colonizers, slavery in the Americas, with maps and illustrations. The criticsm section includes writings by Sir Walter Scott, Virginia Woolf, Laura Brown, Mary Beth Rose, and many others. New printing of the 1997 edition. Norton, Paper. NEW. $20.00