In the following essay, Chetin considers Head's concept of exile, feminist perspective, and use of myth in The Collector of Treasures.

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

In the following essay, Gagiano offers a stylistic and thematic analysis of The Cardinals.

In the following essay, Harrow views boundaries—maintaining and overcoming them—as the major thematic concern in Head's short fiction.

In the following essay, Thomas discusses Head's narrative technique in her short fiction.

In the following essay, Lewis analyzes Head's concept of identity in The Cardinals in light of the author's mixed heritage and the racial laws of 1960s South Africa.

In the following essay, Feurle discusses parallels between Head's “The Wind and a Boy” and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe.

In the following essay, Sample discusses Head's fictional representation of space in The Collector of Treasures.

In the following essay, Ingersoll explores Head's treatment of sexuality in her short fiction, particularly her perceptions of female sexuality.

In the following essay, Thorpe surveys the defining characteristics of Head's The Collector of Treasures, describing the stories as “rooted, folkloristic tales woven from the fabric of village life and intended to entertain and enlighten, not to engage the modern close critic.”

In the following excerpt, Barnett explores the roles of religion and morality in The Collector of Treasures.

[Bessie Head's novels] are strange, ambiguous, deeply personal books which initially do not seem to be 'political' in any ordinary sense of the word. On the contrary, any reader with either Marxist or Pan-Africanist political affinities is likely to be irritated by the seeming emphasis on the quest for personal contentment, the abdication of political kingship—metaphorically in When Rain Clouds Gather, literally in Maru, and one might say wholesale in A Question of Power. The nov...

[Bessie Head's three novels] deal in different ways with exile and oppression. The protagonists are outsiders, new arrivals who try to forge a life for themselves in a poor, under-populated third world country, where traditional and modern attitudes to soil and society are in conflict. These are familiar themes in African writing but Bessie Head may be distinguished from other African writers in at least two respects. In the first place she does not idealize the African past and in the second she res...

Even though in a narrow sense the context of Bessie Head's fiction is Botswana, her novels, preoccupied with themes of political and spiritual exile, racial hatred and the source of corrupting power and authority, reflect in an important and deep way the bitter world of inhumanity and racism which exists throughout South Africa. The physical landscape of Botswana is colored with her own history of exile, race confusion and her search for what she labels in her first novel, When Rain Clouds Gather, an...

In the following review, Larson provides a mixed assessment of Tales of Tenderness and Power.

Bessie Head's A Question of Power is important not solely because it is an introspective novel by an African woman but because the topics of her concern are also, for the most part, foreign to African fiction as a sub-division of the novel in the Third World: madness, sexuality, guilt. In its concern with these ideas, A Question of Power bears closer affinity to the works by two Caucasian writers from southern Africa—Doris Lessing and Nadine Gordimer—than to those of Ms. Head's A...

In the following excerpt, Jaggi provides a favorable assessment of Tales of Tenderness and Power.

In the following positive review of The Cardinals, with Meditations and Short Stories, Newson asserts that “Head provides something of a poetic rendering of what it means to be a woman and a writer in the male-dominated, racist, and sexist South Africa of her formative years as a writer.”

If one unconsciously thinks of schizophrenia as a unique product of Western culture, it is startling to discover in A Question of Power, by the South African novelist Bessie Head, a profound enlargement of the geographical as well as the symbolic regions of madness. (p. 30) The "question of power" is the many-leveled issue of the novel, expanded to include both internal and external dimensions. Elizabeth's dissociated personality first reveals the idea of "soul power" ...

Maru is set in similar territory [as When Rain Clouds Gather], and this time Mrs. Head concentrates on the relationships of a handful of educated Africans. Two young chiefs fall in love with a schoolteacher who, though brought up and educated by a missionary's wife (a character so well drawn that it is a pity she disappears so soon from the story), belongs to the despised Bushman tribe. The story depends on the belief—much insisted Bessie Head 1937– Court...

In Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind, [Bessie Head] has written a chronicle that makes her adopted home … accessible to the imagination of outsiders…. Her task was almost intractably complex, given that she could assume no shared background knowledge among the majority of her readers. It was no doubt the novelist in her that extracted a structure for the book from the characters of Serowe's three most beneficial leaders. (p. 23) Within this tripartite framework, the words of nearly 100 i...

Bessie Head's third novel [A Question of Power] is a remarkable attempt to escape from the limitations of mere "protest" literature in which Black South African writers so often find themselves. It would have been natural for her, and easier, to have written an attack on the indignities of apartheid which have driven her into exile in Botswana. Certainly South African racism is the ultimate source of the difficulties besetting Elizabeth, her "coloured" protagonist. But Hea...

Reading any book by Bessie Head is always a pleasure, though this talented South African writer's newest work, Serowe: Village of the Rain Wind,… falls in a special category. What Head has so effectively done is to take all her gifts as a novelist and use these talents in shaping a quasi-sociological account of the village in Botswana where she has lived for most of the past ten years. Part history, part anthropology and folklore, Serowe conjured up for me memories of Studs Terkel's Har...

In a footnote to the first of her 'Botswana village tales' in The Collector of Treasures, Bessie Head says that she has 'romanticised and fictionalised' data provided by old men of the tribe whose memories are unreliable. The farther she goes into history and tradition, the less convincing the results, but the stories come wonderfully alive when she deals with Botswana just before and after independence. The clash between old tribal ways and the temptations of modern society play...

[An] outcast is the central figure in Bessie Head's first novel [When Rain Clouds Gather, a] naked sociological commentary…. There is too much undiluted sociological and agricultural textbook language, but the book is justified by loving and humorous descriptions of African land and people, by powerful, generous feeling and passionate analysis of the situation of the black African. She is especially moving on the position of women, emerging painfully from the chrysalis of tribalist attitudes i...