'I need a quiet backwater and a sense of living as though I am barely alive on the earth, treading a small, careful pathway through life.' A Woman Alone is a collection of autobiographical writings, sketches and essays which covers the entire span of Bessie Head's creative life, up to her death in 1986 at the age of 49. It reveals a woman of great sensitivity and vitality, inspired through her knowledge of suffering in a 'reverence for ordinary people' and finding some healing for her own anguish in a quiet corner of Africa.