een a relative of Francis, Lord Willoughby of
Parham, sometime administrator of several British colonies in the West
Indies, having been promised a post of some importance in these
dependencies. John Amis died on the voyage out, but his widow and
children necessarily continued their journey, and upon their arrival
were accommodated at St. John's Hill, one of the best houses in the
district. Her life and adventures in Surinam Aphra has herself
realistically told in that wonderfully vivid narrative, _Oroonoko_. [9]
The writer's bent had already shown itself. She kept a journal as many
girls will, she steeped herself in the interminable romances fashionable
at that time, in the voluminous _Pharamond_, _Cleopatre_, _Cassandre_,
_Ibrahim_, and, above all, _Le Grand Cyrus_, so loved and retailed to
the annoyance of her worthy husband by Mrs. Pepys; with a piece of which
Dorothy Osborne was 'hugely pleased'.

[Footnote 9: In 'Mrs. Behn's _Oroonoko_' Dr. Bernbaum elaborately
endeavours to show that this story is pure fiction. His arguments,
in many cases advanced with no little subtlety and precision, do not
appear (to me at least) to be convincing. We have much to weigh in
the contrary balance: Mrs. Behn's manifest first-hand knowledge of,
and extraordinary interest in, colonial life; her reiterated
asseverations that every experience detailed in this famous novel is
substantially true; the assent of all her contemporaries. It must
further be remembered that Aphra was writing in 1688, of a girlhood
coloured by and seen through the enchanted mists of a quarter of a
century. That there are slight discrepancies is patent; the
exaggerations, however, are not merely pardonable but perfectly
natural. One of Dr. Bernbaum's most crushing arguments, when sifted,
seems to resolve itself into the fact that whilst writing _Oroonoko_
Mrs. Behn evidently had George Warren's little book, _An Impartial
Description of Surinam_ (London, 1667), at hand. Could anything be
more reasonable than to suppose she would be intimately acquainted
with a volume descriptive of her girlhood's home? Again, Dr.
Bernbaum bases another line of argument on the assumption that Mrs.
Behn's father was a barber. Hence the appointment of such a man to
an official position in Surinam was impossible, and, 'if Mrs. Behn's
father was not sent to Surinam, the only reason she gives for being
there disappears'. We know from recen