SOURCE: Eilersen, Gillian Stead. “A Sense of Community, 1973–1974.” In Bessie Head, Thunder Behind Her Ears: Her Life and Writing, pp. 154–70. Cape Town & Johannesburg: David Philip Publishers Ltd, 1995.

In the following essay, Eilersen provides a biographical account of Head's life at the time of The Collector of Treasures.

Bessie could have relaxed and celebrated her success, with her controversial novel finally accepted for publishing. The euphoric upsurge seemed sadly lacking, however. The novel's stormy passage had cost her some friends, and this began to worry her as the year drew to its close: ‘The personal and the impersonal causes a terrible pain in my heart. I lost so many good friends during the time a thunderstorm raged in my life. They actually got nervous breakdowns from my letters,’¹ she wrote to Giles Gordon in early December 1972. Three weeks later she put it even more plainly:

I can't carry on...