SOURCE: "Nadine Gordimer's Selected Stories," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XXII, No. 3, 1981, pp. 45-54.

In the following essay, Githii compares several of Gordimer's earlier and later stories in order to trace her thematic and stylistic maturation.

Nadine Gordimer's Selected Stories (1975) is a collection of short stories from an author whose eight novels and numerous articles and critical reviews form an impressive body of work extending over thirty years. Her precise observations and impressions of life in South Africa recorded in the stories have won for her a reputation that has grown through the years, while many of the stories have become classics both in literature of Africa and around the world. An examination of the stories will reveal the author's intellectual and moral development, as well as the artistic embodiment of that development. We shall also discover the extent to which the author's background and circumstances...