The cumulative achievement of [Buchi Emecheta's] Second-Class Citizen (1975), The Bride Price (1976) and The Slave Girl (1977) has commanded my mounting admiration. In narratives of attractively readable simplicity (the sort that requires terrific art to bring off) she has successively charted the efforts of a Nigerian woman and her burgeoning family to survive the bleaknesses of a hostile London, and the problems of love and marriage in present and recently-past Nigeria. With the compelling warmth of an extraordinary capacity for investing her fictional world and her characters—even the grisliest—with deep affection she rebukes whole arrays of hostile forces. London racists, husbands, tribal traditionalists, missionary functionaries: the inhuman is everywhere laid bare. Buchi Emecheta speaks particularly, of course, for educated Nigerian women struggling against their more ignorant menfolk. But she speaks, too, for all women, for all the oppressed…. (p. 747)

Valentine Cunningham, "The Jock Campbell New Statesman Award: The...