One of the pioneers of Senegalese literature, Mariama Ba was a woman intellectual. A teacher by training, she had been involved in associations activism for a better consideration of women’s issues. It is in her twilight years that her literary genius blossomed with the publication of So Long a Letter, a novel that forcefully poses the questions of polygamy and the castes in a predominantly Muslim Senegalese society, which is stongly attached to its traditions, but that is also going through profound transformations and changes and confronted with new models of society.