The striking name of the playwright and novelist Aphra Behn, pioneering queen of English literature, remains largely unrecognised outside academia and the theatre. But this summer, almost 400 years after her birth, Behn’s talents are being celebrated, and especially in her home town of Canterbury. Her extraordinary and mysterious career is being marked by a Netflix film, a statue, a revived play and – the cherry on the cake – by the discovery of a rare first edition 1688 copy of her most famous novel, Oroonoko.
Studied in schools and universities, Oroonoko is the story of an enslaved African prince in the Guianas in the colonial era and is the earliest fictional chronicle of these experiences written in English. He is tricked onto a ship that takes him to Suriname, where he leads an abortive uprising and is violently punished. The story is thought to have inspired the abolitionist movement and only a handful of other copies exist, most in the United States. The newly unearthed original, now on display in an exhibition about Behn in Canterbury, is owned by Anna Astin, 81, who, as a teenager in the 1950s, had been allowed to take it home from her father’s Kent antique shop.
