ABSTRACT
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart is the first title in Heinemann’s African Writers Series. His Igbo compatriot Flora Nwapa’s Efuru, the first novel in the series by a woman, is the twenty-sixth. Because Heinemann was the major English publisher of African literature between 1958 and 1986, such figures are significant: the gap of eight years and of twenty-five titles between the appearance of Achebe’s canonical text and the publication of the first femaleauthored work in the series. Furthermore, the next work in the series by a woman, Idu, also by Nwapa, did not appear until 1970, thirty male-authored texts later. How can these gaps be explained? What are the factors to which the relatively small number of women authors can be attributed?
