Fittingly, the book begins with a story of her recognition of mortality at the age of ten. Kincaid’s first novel, Annie John, is about a talented young girl in Antigua who, while growing into early womanhood, must separate herself from her mother.

However, even if her incantatory rhythms and her tight focus on bleak, emotional situations in her post- Annie John works are not universally appreciated, few readers deny her eye for poetic detail and her ability to achieve a shimmering honesty in her prose.

Admittedly, this style is not to everyone’s taste, and even quite a few readers who were seduced by Kincaid’s earlier works were less pleased with Lucy and The Autobiography of My Mother. Kincaid seems less interested in solving fictional problems than in exploring contrary states of mind that perceive problems. This colonial setting strongly relates to her mother-daughter subject matter, because the narrators Annie and Lucy of her first two novels both seem to make a connection between their Anglophile mothers and the colonial English, and also because the childhood experiences of both narrators have been shaped by a colonial background that limits their options and makes their relationships with their mothers that much more intense.īeginning with Lucy, Kincaid cultivates a detachment with which she explores issues of anger and loss, carefully disallowing any easy resolution.

Kincaid’s native Antigua is central in her writing. Nonetheless, it was At the Bottom of the River that won for Kincaid the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award for short fiction and that contained “Girl,” a story written as a stream of instructions from a mother to a daughter, which is her best-known piece. Though the individual pieces in each work have a self-contained unity, Annie John and Lucy also have a clear continuity from story to story, something less true of the impressionistic writing of At the Bottom of the River thus, it is often considered a collection of short stories, while Annie John and Lucy are clearly novels. Most of the pieces that constitute At the Bottom of the River and Annie John were first published in The New Yorker, as were the chapters of Lucy. She began her career by mastering the short story, the form from which her longer fiction grew. More so than many fiction writers, she is an autobiographical writer whose life and art are inextricably woven together. Jamaica Kincaid (born, May 25, 1949) is known for her impressionistic prose, which is rich with detail presented in a poetic style, her continual treatment of mother-daughter issues, and her relentless pursuit of honesty.

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