Summary In this article Bessie Head's letters--mainly those published in the two collections, Vigne's A Gesture of Belonging (1991) and Cullinan's/maginative Trespasser (2005) along with extracts from her letters quoted in Eilersen's biography of Head, Thunder Behind Her Ears (1995)--are used to suggest that in these texts we have a broken or intermittent autobiography. As the quotations illustrate, Head's published letters (almost all dating from her Botswana years) demonstrate certain recurrent patterns: particularly her perceptions of social exclusion and the psychic strategy of surmounting these obstacles to make of them her vantage point from which to observe and evaluate the human limitations and possibilities of her time and place--but widely seen, hence the image of living "on an horizon" that she wished to invoke in the autobiography she had intended writing.
