Based on a True Story, Ourika relates the experiences of a Senegalese girl who is rescued from slavery and raised
by an aristocratic French family during the French Revolution. Brought up in a household of learning and privilege,
she is unaware of her difference until she overhears a conversation that makes her suddenly conscious of her race
- and of the prejudice it arouses. From this point on, Ourika lives her life not as a French woman but as a black
woman "cut off from the entire human race. " As the Reign of Terror threatens her and her adoptive family,
Ourika struggles with her unusual position as an educated African woman in eighteenth-century Europe. A best-seller
in the 1820s, Ourika captured the attention of Duras's peers, including Stendhal, and became the subject of four
contemporary plays. The work represents a number of firsts: the first novel set in Europe to have a black heroine,
the first French literary work narrated by a black female protagonist, and, as John Fowles points out in the foreword
to his translation, "the first serious attempt by a white novelist to enter a black mind. " An inspiration
for Fowles's acclaimed novel The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ourika will astonish and haunt modern readers.