Flora Nwapa’s first novel, and the first novel in English published by a Nigerian woman. The jacket opens with the book’s own first lines: Efuru was her name, she was a remarkable woman, it was not only that she came from a distinguished family — she was distinguished herself; her husband was not known and people wondered why she married him.
The flap describes a woman above the ordinary run of her neighbours in the Eastern Nigerian village where she lives with her husband Adizua, her only equal being her formidable and dominating counterpart in the village.
The author note traces a career before the writing: a father employed in the Eastern region and a mother who was a schoolteacher; Archdeacon Crowther Memorial Girls’ School in Port Harcourt; on returning to Nigeria an appointment as an Education Officer in Calabar, transferred the following year to Queen’s School, Enugu, teaching English and geography; and in December 1962 a move to the University of Lagos as Assistant Registrar for Public Relations. The book is dedicated to the memory of A. C. Nwapa.
The dedication leaf also carries a Sheffield library stamp, so this copy travelled from an English public or university collection before returning here — the reverse of the usual direction, and the reason the collection exists.
Incomplete record. The four scanned pages are the two jacket flaps, the dedication and the rear board. There is no title page and no imprint page among them, so the publisher, the edition and the year cannot be established from this copy as scanned. Everything above comes from the jacket and the dedication leaf. Please scan the title page and its verso and I will complete the record; until then this entry should not be cited for edition or date.
