Nwapa’s ability to craft words into powerful messages was seen in her writings. She wrote
many books, the most famous being Women are Different, The Lake Goddess and Never
Again. These works were mainly fiction, but through fiction, they corresponded to the
reader, her idea and values of feminism. According to author Marie Umeh, author of
Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa, “The novels of Flora Nwapa examine and revise
the prevalent notions of marriage, social responsibility, self-sacrifice and service to society
and humanity[1].” Nwapa saw women as a facilitator of social change. Her novels were a
break from the patriarchy that reigned in Nigerian literature in her time, as Nwapa’s novels
saw women, like in The Lake Goddess, as self-sacrificing individuals without whom
society would be left in the dark. An example of this is in the aforementioned novel, when
Ona decides to be a spokesperson for the people of her village to the Lake Goddess
Ogbuide. Here, Nwapa used both the common (human) woman and a deity to assert the
individuality and the sheer prominence of women in the social order[2]. Nwapa went
against the grain in her novels to ensure that stereotypes of women being subordinate were
broken. Traditionally women were, and sometimes still are, seen as simply carriers of
children or the care takers of children. Nwapa breaks this stereotype beautifully in her