Gordimer wrote in an essay in "What Happened to Burger's Daughter" that "The theme of my novel is human conflict between the desire to live a personal, private life, and the rival claim of social responsibility to one's fellow men". Dominic Head says that Gordimer's novels often experiment with the relation of "public and private realms", and that "Burger's Daughter" "represents one of the peaks in this experimentation". Boyers notes that the theme of "public and private", and the relation between them, is balanced in the book "so as to privilege neither one not the other".