Buchi Emecheta is … concerned with tyranny, but her attention is more precisely fixed on the trials of a specific gender than of a particular nation. Although the action of The Joys of Motherhood is confined to 20th-century Nigeria, it teaches lessons which could equally well be learnt elsewhere. The economic and familial pressures exerted on women in Western communities are less obvious, but no less pervasive, than those which surround others in and around Lagos. The novel's heroine, Nnu Ego, is first living and then dead proof of this….

Emecheta describes [her heroine's death] with moving simplicity. By viewing her heroine's fate with a compound of anger and pity, she avoids sounding either didactic or sentimental, and intensifies the force of her bleak conclusions.