Lucy Josephine Potter, the protagonist of Jamaica Kincaid’s 1990 roman à clef, Lucy, doesn’t like using her full name, which reminds her of hard times. At the outset of the novel, however, that’s the least of her concerns: At 19, Lucy has never eaten refrigerated food, ridden in an elevator, or had a room of her own.

Until now, that is, for Lucy has come to an East Coast city full of mysteries—for one, the alien fact that it can be cold even as the sun shines brightly. “I was no longer in a tropical zone,” she muses, “and this realization now entered my life like a flow of water dividing formerly dry and solid ground, creating two banks, one of which was my past…and the other my future.”

If her future is unknown, her past is something to obliterate, a locus of unhappy memories of childhood on a little Caribbean island 8 miles wide and 12 miles long. Even so small a place, Lucy recounts, was largely terra incognita: “I had never set foot on three-quarters of it.”

On that other quarter lived Lucy’s father, who sired an archipelago of descendants, and a mother who disapproved of Lucy’s interests and, while envisioning long and successful lives as doctors and lawyers for her brothers, found no room in her mind for Lucy to flourish.

So it is that Lucy departed the island, and now she refuses to answer, even to open, the letters her mother writes to her. Those letters find Lucy caring for the four children of wealthy parents. While papa is off at his law firm and mama is off doing whatever it is that she does, Lucy walks the children to school, walks them home, makes them lunch, reads and plays with them in the afternoon. At night she studies to become a nurse. All the while she marvels at the cold and at the ways of the bourgeoisie, whose complaints about the cold “made me think that they said this every time winter came around.”

The household maid does not like Lucy, she announces, because Lucy speaks like a nun. She’s far from it: She develops a healthy sex life and a friendship with an Irish American tough girl with whom she smokes pot and finds youthful escape. But neither is she a wastrel, and as the marriage of her employers disintegrates in lovelessness and betrayal, she becomes an ever more acute judge of character. When Mariah, the children’s oppressively needy mother, announces that she is part Native American, Lucy pegs it exactly: “How do you get to be the sort of victor who can claim to be the vanquished also?”

Jamaica Kincaid, who also arrived in this country as an au pair at the age of 16, gives Lucy plenty of time to chart the course of her own life. Like a Jane Austen heroine—and Kincaid, a fan of Austen’s, clearly had her in mind—Lucy succeeds in finding her way with a resolute refusal to be overwhelmed by new surroundings and customs. She’s a wonder, and, 30 years on, her adventures in a strange land resonate.

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.