In the following essay excerpt, Holst Petersen examines The Bride Price as "a logical development" of Emecheta's autobiographical writing.

It comes as no surprise that the manuscript Francis burned in Second Class Citizen surfaces as Emecheta's 1976 book, The Bride Price. With this book, set in the early 1950s in Lagos and Ibuza, she departs from her own life story. Despite this radical shift in subject matter, The Bride Price is a logical development of her writing. She continues to explore the injustices of caste, one of her main concerns in the first two books, but the emphasis is somewhat different. Whereas in her autobiographical books Emecheta stresses the possibility of overcoming the restrictions of caste or caste-like conditions through personal initiative, in The Bride Price and the following novels set in Nigeria she stresses the destructive potential of rigid caste structures, which persist in the otherwise rapidly...