Kincaid on NPR

You can listen to Jamaica Kincaid talk about subversiveness in British classics for a Morning Edition segment.

Because of her own rebellious nature, Kincaid admired characters who stood up for themselves and defied authority. Not surprisingly, the powerful figure of Lucifer in John Milton’s Paradise Lost exerted a strong pull on her imagination. Kincaid encountered the epic poem at age 7 — as a punishment, she was assigned to copy by hand books one and two. Even at that young age, Kincaid admired Lucifer’s defiance and took comfort in it. “It had the perverse effect on me of making me feel that what I had done wrong was right,” she says. “Because I was reading about someone who had done something wrong and who gloried in it.”