SOURCE: "Journies to the Interior: The African Stories of Audrey Thomas," in The Canadian Fiction Magazine, No. 44, 1982, pp. 98-110.

Grady is the editor of The Penguin Book of Canadian Short Stories (1980), The Penguin Book of Modern Canadian Short Stories (1982), and the journal Books in Canada. In the following essay, he examines how Thomas's stories set in Africa present women at various stages of self-discovery.

When Margaret Laurence arrived in North Africa in the 1950s the first real African she met was the man who was to be her steward, Mohamed, so eager to help and yet so difficult to understand. In The Prophet's Camel Bell (1963) she recalls watching Mohamed's face silhouetted against the African sky above the ship's launch: "It was a face I could not read at all," she writes, "a well-shaped brown face that seemed expressionless, as though whatever lay behind his eyes would be kept...