Intense personal experiences of South Africa’s brutal social system, a sense of stifled creativity and a distaste for politics made Bessie Head leave for Botswana on an exit permit at the age of 27. There, in her chosen rural ‘haven’ of Serowe, and despite a severe mental breakdown, she wrote the novels and stories that earned her international recognition as one of Africa’s most remarkabble and individual writers.
A Woman Alone is a collections of autobiographical writings, sketches, and essays which covers the entire span of Bessie Head’s creative life, up to her death in 1986 at age 49. It reveals a woman of great sensitivity and vitality, inspired through her knowledge of suffering in a ‘reverence for ordinary people’ and finding some healing for her own anguish in a quiet corner of Africa.
