According to M. Keith Booker in The African Novel in English: An Introduction, Emecheta "is probably Africa's best-known and most widely read woman novelist." She has been supporting herself and her family with her writing since 1972, when she published her first book In the Ditch. Her work has been widely translated and read all over the world, and indeed, she told interviewer Reed Way Dasenbrock in Interviews with Writers of the Post-Colonial World, "I try to write for the world."

However, she has occasionally been criticized by Nigerian writers, who feel that in some of her books, she writes about topics that, as a woman, she should not consider. Of her book Destination Biafra, about the Nigerian civil war, she told Dasenbrock, "Nigerian critics feel that the language I use . . . is not appropriate. They would like me to use big military words, because I'm writing about...