Foluso Agbaje’s “The Parlour Wife” Is An Ode to Women Battling for Selfhood

Foluso Agbaje paints colonial Lagos with masterful strokes, breathing life into every scene. The colonial administrators stride through the streets of Ikoyi and Lagos Island, casting long shadows over the indigenous life below. The rhythmic tides near the sea where Baba Kehinde dies whisper ancient stories, while the Ereko market pulses with raw life: the metallic tang of blood from slaughtered animals mixing with the discordance of traders and hagglers. The narrative unfolds from a deeply personal lens, allowing readers to inhabit Kehinde’s innermost thoughts, and share in her sorrows and rare moments of joy. Structured in four distinct parts, only in the final quarter does Kehinde get her happy ending. Through it all, Agbaje’s storytelling remains tender and unflinching, ensuring that Kehinde’s journey etches itself permanently in the reader’s heart.

A woman is the peacemaker. She learns to quell storms before they reach her husband’s temper, to swallow her own anger. Like the sacrificial lamb of biblical lore, she is expected to lay her aspirations on the altar of family duty, her dreams becoming whispers in the wind. Society casts her as life’s vessel, yet often denies her choice in whose life she carries. She bears the weight of expectations; to accept an unwanted marriage, to nurture a seed planted without her consent, to prove her worth through motherhood—as if her existence isn’t testament enough. This was the crucible that forged Kehinde Ilesanmi. A young woman whose passion for writing burned against the suffocating constraints of tradition. While others saw a parlour wife—docile, accepting, resigned—Kehinde harbored quiet defiance. She refused to let her story end in the parlour where so many women’s dreams lay gathering dust, instead, she held onto her dreams, dreams that, if not for her will, would have withered, leaving her forever as The Parlour Wife. 

Set in 1939, as World War II reshapes the globe, the story unfolds in an era when women’s voices were unheard. Time and again, Mr Ogunjobi attempts to clip Kehinde’s wings, reminding her of her “place.” This happens until she meets Emeka, who sees not a flower to be pressed between pages, but a woman whose spirit refuses to be contained. In him, she finally discovers what love looks like when it doesn’t wear the mask of ownership. After her father’s death, her family thrusts Kehinde into a polygamous household ruled by a supposedly wicked first wife—a colonial Snow White tale where the poison apple is matrimony itself. Yet Mama Tope’s cruelty masks a deeper truth, she is merely another woman whom circumstance shapes, her bitterness blooming from watching her husband collect wives, powerless to object in a world where men’s desires are law. Who could go against the law?

Decades after the war, while some progress has been made, some things remain the same. Several families still view daughters as economic assets, and their bride prices a ticket to uplift their sons’ futures. Social media platforms like X ring with dated perspectives—men declaring women “expired” at 30 when they dare prioritize careers over marriage, while their male counterparts face no such judgments. The recent Equatorial Guinea director controversy perfectly illustrates this double standard. His 400 leaked intimate videos were met with celebration, hailing him as a legend. while women in the same situation have faced merciless public crucifixion. These parallel narratives, separated by decades yet bound by the same prejudices, reveal how deeply gender bias remains woven into our social fabric.

Agbaje highlights, very strongly, the deeply rooted gender inequalities that have plagued societies past and present. In the novel’s era, educating women is an afterthought—a luxury easily sacrificed, as evidenced by the contrast between the twins, Taiwo and Kehinde. This painful reality echoes, too, in the story of Tope Ogunjobi, whom her father married off to seal a business deal. Women’s desires and ambitions were irrelevant, they were women, after all.

Most women do have dreams—but society has perfected the art of their suffocation. While Kehinde clawed her way to a happy ending, countless women remain trapped in lives of quiet desperation. Their reality is far from the romantic escape to London with a loving partner. Instead, they shoulder the burden of survival while their providers squander family resources in beer parlors, drowning responsibilities in bottles of alcohol. For every Kehinde who breaks free, thousands of women endure until their last breath. These women’s dreams don’t die because they never existed; they die because the world decides their wants are inconvenient. While inspiring, Kehinde’s triumph illuminates a bitter truth: only a few can afford her path to freedom, both literally and figuratively.

While The Parlour Wife masterfully showcases Nigerian life during World War II—a period rarely explored in recent Nigerian literature—it cannot escape the shadow of privilege that colors Kehinde Ogunjobi’s journey. Though Kehinde herself might resist this truth, her starting point afforded her advantages many women could only dream of. Yet her privilege alone couldn’t carve her path to freedom; it merely cracked open a door she still had to force her way through. Perhaps therein lies this story’s deepest resonance. If a privileged woman had to battle so fiercely for her liberation, then her triumph becomes not a tale of advantage, but one of human will. For women with far less, Kehinde’s story whispers of possibility—that even in the darkest corners of circumstance, one might still raise her head and fight. Not because victory is guaranteed, but because her life hangs in the balance. In the end, every woman’s survival depends not on the height from which she starts, but on her refusal to live half a life.