Extremely Rare 17th Century Aphra Behn Novel Oroonoko Found on Home Bookshelf Goes on Show

A rare first edition 1688 copy of Aphra Behn’s novel Oroonoko has gone on display at The Beaney House of Art & Knowledge in Canterbury, England.

The book has been added to the museum’s current summer exhibition which is celebrating the life and work of locally-born Aphra Behn, the first professional woman writer in the English language, through August 18.

Its inclusion in the exhibition comes after the book’s owner, Kent-based Anna Astin, came to visit the Beaney with her daughter Christina, bringing the book with them to show museum staff. Anna had taken ownership of the book as a girl more than 50 years ago when she chose it from the bookshelves of her father’s shop on Fulham Road in London, where he sold antiques.

But despite knowing it was old, Anna and Christina were not aware of its rarity. Only 13 copies are known to exist globally and all of these are housed in libraries and universities in the UK and America, including the British Library, Oxford University and Yale University Library. The Astin family has now donated it to the Beaney for the remainder of the exhibition.

Cabinet member for Culture and Heritage, Cllr Charlotte Cornell, said: "Early books by female writers are hugely in demand at the moment, so this discovery is both rare and timely. You can very clearly tell from both looking at and handling the book that this has been much-loved, read and shared over the more than 300 years it has existed. It is now, of course, very fragile but it also remains in a good condition to read and is as compelling now as it would have been all those years ago.

“When we put on the exhibition we were in fact hoping that publicity might help to uncover one of the lost portraits of Aphra Behn. At least two lost portraits are known to be out there somewhere. With the discovery of the book, however, perhaps we’ve found something even better.”

Oroonoko is a novel about the sufferings of an enslaved African prince in colonial-era Surinam. Over the last 20 years it has been recognised as a key text that helped to inspire the abolitionist movement. It is also considered one of the first novels written in the English language, being written 31 years before Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. No copy of this book has been sold on the open market in over the last 50 years.