Books set in Dominica with a real sense of place

About the literature of Dominica

Dominica's best-known writing in English comes from two women, Jean Rhys and Phyllis Shand Allfrey, both born into white Creole families on the island. English is the official language, and many Dominicans also speak Kwéyòl, a French-based Creole. Dominica is a small island, and very little by its writers is easy to find in English outside it. What does reach readers keeps returning to colonial class and race and to the plantation past.

Allfrey's The Orchid House brings three sisters home to their family's declining estate in colonial Dominica. Jean Rhys's Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography begins with her girlhood in Roseau around 1900. Lennox Honychurch, a Dominican historian, traces the island from Kalinago (Carib) homelands to independence in The Dominica Story: A History of the Island, with close knowledge of its villages.

By writers from Dominica

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The Orchid House

Phyllis Shand Allfrey

Novel, 1953

Three sisters return to a declining white estate family in colonial Dominica, showing class, race, social unrest and the island's lush landscape.

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Wider picks

By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Dominica.

Smile Please: An Unfinished Autobiography

Jean Rhys

Memoir, 1979

Wider pick: Memoir where Dominica is only the early chapters

Its opening chapters recall a white Creole girlhood in Roseau and the Dominican countryside around 1900, in a society marked by colonial race and class divisions.