The popularity of the book was instantaneous. It passed through several editions. It was translated into French and German, and adapted for the German stage, while Sothern put it on the stage in England. It created almost as great a sensation as did Uncle Tom's Cabin two hundred years later. Like Mrs. Stowe's novel it had a strong moral influence, as it was among the earliest efforts to call the attention of Europe to the evils of the African slave trade. Moreover, this her first novel gave Mrs. Behn an acknowledged place as a writer.
Oroonoko marks a distinct advance in English fiction. Nearly all novels before this had consisted of a series of stories held together by a loosely formed plot running through a number of volumes, sometimes only five, but occasionally, as in The Grand Cyrus, filling ten quartos. Their form was such that like the Thousand and One Nights they could be continued indefinitely. Most of these novels belonged either to the pastoral romance or the historical allegory. In the former the ladies and gentlemen who in a desultory sort of way carried on the plot were disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses and lived in idyllic state in Arcadia. In the latter they masqueraded under the names of kings and queens of antiquity and entered with the flourish of trumpets and the sound of drums.
Oroonoko was the first English novel with a well developed plot. It moves along rapidly, without digression, to its tragic conclusion. Not until Fielding wrote Joseph Andrews was the plot of any English novel so definitely wrought. The lesser writer had a slight advantage over the greater. Mrs. Behn's novel is constructed upon dramatic lines, so that it holds the interest more closely to the main characters, and the end is awaited with intense expectation; while Fielding chose the epic form, which is more discursive, and Joseph Andrews like all his novels is excessively tame, almost hackneyed in its conclusion. Mrs. Behn's black hero is the first distinctly drawn character in English fiction, the first one that has any marked personality. Sometimes the enthusiasm with which he is described brings a smile to the lips of the modern reader and reminds one of the heroic savages of James Fenimore Cooper and Helen Hunt Jackson. She writes of him: "He was pretty tall, but of a Shape the most exact that can be Fancy'd: The most famous Statuary could not form the Figure of a Man more admirably turned from Head to Foot.... There was no one Grace wanting, that bears the Standard of true Beauty." And thus she continues the description in the superlative degree.
But the story is for the most part realistic. Although the scenes in Africa show the influence of the French heroic novels, as if the author were afraid to leave her story in its simple truth but must adorn it with purple and ermine, as soon as it is transferred to Surinam, where Mrs. Behn had lived, it becomes real. It has local colouring, at that time an almost unknown attribute. It has the atmosphere of the tropics. The descriptions are vivid, and often photographic. Occasionally they are exaggerated, but few travellers to a region of which their hearers know nothing have been able to resist the temptation to deviate from the exact truth. But the whole novel, even at this late day, leaves one with the impression that it is a true biography.
In the history of the English novel, in which Pamela is given an important place as the morning star which heralded the great light of English realism about to burst upon the world, this well arranged, definite, picturesque story of Oroonoko, whose author was reposing quietly within the hallowed precincts of Westminster Abbey fifty years before Richardson introduced Pamela to an admiring public, should not be forgotten. Before Pamela was published, the complete works of Mrs. Behn passed through eight editions. The plots of all her novels are well constructed, with little extraneous matter, but with the exception of Oroonoko the characters are shadowy beings, many of whom meet with a violent death. The Nun or the Perjured Duty has only five characters, all of whom perish in the meshes of love. The Fair Jilt or the Amours of Prince Tarquin and Miranda, founded on incidents that came to the author's knowledge during her residence in Antwerp, is well fitted for the columns of a modern yellow journal; the beautiful heroine causes the death of everyone who stands in the way of her love or her ambition, but she finally repents and lives happy ever after. Mrs. Behn's style is always careless, owing to her custom of writing while entertaining friends.
A great change took place in the public taste during the next hundred years, so that Mrs. Behn's novels, plays, and poems fell into disrepute. Sir Walter Scott tells the story of his grand-aunt who expressed a desire to see again Mrs. Behn's novels, which she had read with delight in her youth. He sent them to her sealed and marked "private and confidential." The next time he saw her, she gave them back with the words:
"Take back your bonny Mrs. Behn, and, if you will take my advice, put her in the fire, for I find it impossible to get through the very first novel. But is it not a very odd thing that I, an old woman of eighty and upward, sitting alone, feel myself ashamed to read a book which sixty years ago I have heard read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London?"
Mrs. Behn has been accused of great license in her conduct and of gross immorality in her writings. Her friend and biographer says of the former: "For my part I knew her intimately, and never saw ought unbecoming the just modesty of our sex, though more free and gay than the folly of the precise will allow." For the latter the fashion must be blamed more than she. Mrs. Behn was not actuated by the high moral principles of Mademoiselle de Scudéri and Madame de Lafayette, with whom love was an ennobling passion, nor was she writing for the refined men and women of the Hotel Rambouillet; she was striving to earn a living by pleasing the court of Charles the Second, and in that she was eminently successful.
Nearly a quarter of a century after the death of Mrs. Behn, Mrs. Manley published anonymously the first two volumes of the New Atlantis, the book by which she is chiefly known, under the title of Secret Memoirs and Manners of Several Persons of Quality of both Sexes from the New Atalantis, an Island in the Mediterranean. Mrs. Manley was a Tory, and she peopled the New Atalantis with members of the Whig party under Marlborough as Prince Fortunatus. The book is written in the form of a conversation carried on by Astrea, Virtue, and Intelligence, a personification of the Court Gazette. They described the Whig leaders so accurately, and related the scandal of the court so faithfully, that, although fictitious names were used, no key was needed to recognise the personages in the story.
The publisher and printer were arrested for libel, but Mrs. Manley came forward and owned the authorship. In her trial she was placed under a severe cross-examination by Lord Sunderland, who attempted to learn where she had obtained her information. She persisted in her statement that no real characters were meant, that it was all a work of imagination, but if it bore any resemblance to truth it must have come to her by inspiration. Upon Lord Sunderland's objecting to this statement, on the grounds that so immoral a book bore no trace of divine impulse, she replied that there were evil angels as well as good, who might possess equal powers of inspiration. The book was published in May, 1709; in the following February, she was discharged by order of the Queen's Bench.
Soon after her discharge from court, she wrote a third and fourth volume of the New Atalantis under the title, Memoirs of Europe toward the Close of the Eighth Century written by Eginardus, Secretary and Favorite to Charlemagne, and done into English, by the Translator of the New Atalantis. Here she has followed the French models. There is a loosely constructed plot, and the characters tell a series of stories. Many of the writers of Queen Anne's reign are described with none of that lustre that surrounds them now, but as they appeared to a cynical woman who knew them well. She refers to Steele as Don Phaebo, and ridicules his search for the philosopher's stone; and laments that Addison, whom she calls Maro, should prostitute his talents for gold, when he might become a second Vergil.
Mrs. Manley had been well trained to write a book like the New Atalantis. At sixteen, an age when Addison and Steele were at the Charterhouse preparing for Oxford, her father, Sir Roger Manley, died. A cousin, taking advantage