Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner was the first major literary voice to emerge from southern Africa — a woman whose single great novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), exploded into Victorian literary culture with a force that startled readers accustomed to the conventions of the three-decker romance, and whose subsequent career as a feminist theorist, anti-imperialist polemicist, and allegorical writer made her one of the most intellectually courageous and personally tormented figures of the late nineteenth century. She was admired by Havelock Ellis, Eleanor Marx, and Cecil Rhodes (before she turned against him), corresponded with Gladstone and Gandhi, and produced a body of work that anticipated twentieth-century feminism by decades — yet she spent much of her life in physical suffering, creative frustration, and the anguish of a woman whose ideas were too far ahead of the world she inhabited.

The Karoo

Schreiner was born in 1855 at the Wittebergen Mission Station in the Cape Colony, the ninth of twelve children born to Gottlob Schreiner, a German Lutheran missionary, and Rebecca Lyndall, an Englishwoman of fierce religious conviction. The family lived in poverty, moving between mission stations across the eastern Cape. Her mother’s harshness — she once beat Olive for using an Afrikaans word instead of English — and her father’s financial collapse left permanent marks. Olive was largely self-educated, reading voraciously whatever books came her way.

As a teenager and young woman, she worked as a governess on isolated Karoo farms — the vast, semi-arid plateau of the interior Cape — and it was during these years of loneliness and intellectual hunger that she wrote The Story of an African Farm. The Karoo landscape — its emptiness, its silence, its indifferent beauty — entered her prose as more than setting. It became the correlative of an existential condition: the experience of consciousness in a universe without consolation.

The Story of an African Farm

The Story of an African Farm (1883), published under the pseudonym “Ralph Iron,” told the story of two children growing up on a remote Boer farm in the Karoo — Lyndall, a fiercely intelligent girl who refuses the domestic destiny assigned to her sex, and Waldo, a sensitive boy whose search for God leads him into agonising doubt. The novel defied virtually every convention of Victorian fiction. Its plot was episodic and deliberately anticlimactic. Its heroine rejected marriage, bore a child out of wedlock, and died. Its treatment of religious doubt was frank to the point of sacrilege. Its prose combined lyrical description of the landscape with passages of philosophical argument that owed more to Herbert Spencer and John Stuart Mill than to the traditions of the Victorian novel.

The book was an immediate sensation. Its feminism — Lyndall’s famous speeches on the condition of women, delivered with a passion and specificity that had no precedent in English fiction — made it a rallying text for the early women’s movement. Its religious scepticism alienated conservative readers but attracted freethinkers and progressives. Its African setting was unlike anything in English literature.

Dreams and Allegories

After An African Farm, Schreiner struggled for the rest of her life to complete another major novel. She worked intermittently on two novels — From Man to Man (published posthumously in 1926) and Undine (published posthumously in 1929) — but neither was finished to her satisfaction. Instead, she turned increasingly to allegorical writing, producing Dreams (1890), a collection of prose allegories that used symbolic narratives to explore her ideas about women’s emancipation, the relationship between labour and freedom, and the nature of truth. The allegories were enormously popular and were reprinted frequently.

Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) was her most politically explosive work — a fierce denunciation of Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company’s treatment of the Matabele and Mashona peoples, written in the form of an allegorical novella in which a young British soldier encounters a figure who may be Christ. The book infuriated Rhodes and the colonial establishment and was banned in Rhodesia.

Woman and Labour

Woman and Labour (1911) was Schreiner’s major work of feminist theory — a passionate argument that women’s exclusion from productive labour was the root cause of their subordination and that the emancipation of women required their full participation in the economic life of society. The book was called “the Bible of the women’s movement” by Vera Brittain and influenced a generation of suffragists and feminists. Its central concept — “sex parasitism,” the condition of women who were maintained by men in exchange for sexual and reproductive services — was a powerful analytical tool that anticipated later feminist critiques of economic dependency.

Legacy

Schreiner’s health declined throughout her life — she suffered from severe asthma that made breathing agony — and she spent years in England, Italy, and South Africa seeking relief. She died in 1920 in Cape Town. Her reputation faded after her death, partly because her unfinished novels disappointed readers who expected another African Farm, and partly because her allegorical style fell out of fashion. The feminist revival of the 1970s and 1980s brought renewed attention: An African Farm was recognised as a pioneering feminist novel, and Schreiner’s political writings on South Africa, imperialism, and race were reassessed as remarkably prescient.

Collecting Schreiner

The Story of an African Farm (Chapman & Hall, 1883, two volumes, as “Ralph Iron”) is the primary collecting target — first editions are genuinely rare and valuable. Dreams (T. Fisher Unwin, 1890) and Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (T. Fisher Unwin, 1897) are also collected. Schreiner’s extensive correspondence — particularly her letters to Havelock Ellis, Karl Pearson, and W. T. Stead — has been published in multiple scholarly editions. Her papers are held at various institutions, including the University of Cape Town and the Harry Ransom Center.