The Story of an African Farm was published by Chapman and Hall in 1883 under the pseudonym “Ralph Iron.” Schreiner was twenty-eight, living in London after growing up on an isolated farm in the Karoo region of South Africa. The novel caused a sensation: its questioning of Christianity, its treatment of female desire and intellectual ambition, and its refusal to provide conventional plot resolution made it simultaneously scandalous and admired.
The farm is home to three children: Lyndall (beautiful, brilliant, furiously feminist — transparently Schreiner herself), Em (gentle, domestic, accepting), and Waldo (a boy tormented by religious doubt and philosophical hunger). The farm is managed by their guardian Tant’ Sannie — a Boer widow, uneducated and earthy — and the arrival of Bonaparte Blenkins (a charlatan who cons his way into authority) provides the novel’s plot catalyst.
But plot is not really the novel’s mode: it operates through set pieces of philosophical intensity — Waldo’s crisis of faith (he builds an altar to God; God does not come), Lyndall’s devastating analysis of women’s education and social position (a monologue that reads like a feminist manifesto decades ahead of its time), and the novel’s refusal to reward virtue or punish vice according to conventional expectations. Lyndall dies in childbirth, having refused to marry the father; Waldo dies alone, in the sun, of no apparent cause — the novel simply declines to sustain him further.
The book was a touchstone for the New Woman movement of the 1890s: its treatment of female intellectual and sexual autonomy was unprecedented in English fiction.
Collecting The Story of an African Farm
First edition (Chapman and Hall, London, 1883): Two volumes, cloth binding.
Market values:
- First edition, two volumes: $300–$800
- Second edition (one volume, 1883): $80–$200
- Signed copies: $400–$1,000+
- Later 19th-century editions: $30–$60