Who Is Jamaica Kincaid's Girl?

The story titled Girl was written by Jamaica Kincaid in the year of 1978 and was known to be the first piece of fiction that Kincaid had published (Jamaica Kincaid, 1145). Kincaid was born on May 25, 1949 in St. John’s, Antigua. She was an important writer of the twentieth/ twenty-first century whose essays, stories and novels were all related to her family relationships and to her home country, Antigua (Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Jamaica Kincaid”). Her stories are known to cover the hard-hitting subjects of racism, class, gender, and explains how these topics are portrayed throughout culture and the world. Girl was one of Kincaid’s most remembered and powerful writings that involved a child listening to the instructions of her strict mother. The mother teaches her how to become a woman, what it was like growing up in Antigua as a woman, and most importantly the gender issues that were put on young girls as they developed into womanhood (The Odyssey Online, “A Powerful Look At ‘Girl’ by Jamaica Kincaid”).

Jamaica Kincaid grew up in a poor and ordinary family where her mother was a homemaker and her stepfather worked as a carpenter. Once her stepfather got sick, she was forced to drop out of school and help support her family and raise her siblings. Around this time is when she began to read books when she realized she had a passion for reading and

She said when first given to her editor she thought, “He won’t like this…No one will like this, but this is the way I want to write” (JSTOR, “Singular Beast: A Conversation with Jamaica Kincaid”, 468). Her editor published the story in The New Yorker and out of everything else she has written, the story Girl is the most anthologized (JSTOR, “Singular Beast: A Conversation with Jamaica Kincaid”, 468). This story of Kincaid’s is in every guide to writing and many teachers use this reading in their writing, sociology and literature