Olive Schreiner and the New Women of New Zealand: Feminist Solidarities Across the Southern Colonies

This chapter demonstrates how Schreiner’s influence reached far beyond the literary and political networks of which she was directly part. The impacts of Schreiner’s feminist arguments and experimental writing extended to Aotearoa New Zealand, a country Schreiner never visited, and its feminist literary cultures continue to be shaped by the afterlives of her writing. The chapter analyses the intertextual significance of Olive Schreiner’s writings in Louisa Baker’s 1894 novel, A Daughter of the King, the subtitle of which is ‘An Answer to “The Story of an African Farm”’; and Jane Mander’s novel, A Story of a New Zealand River (1920), which incorporates several references and allusions to Schreiner’s most famous novel and allegories from Dreams (1890). In considering the interrelation of South African and New Zealand literary cultures, this chapter examines New Woman writing within the context of what Sarah Comyn and Porscha Fermanis describe as the ‘southern archive’ (2021, p.3), a nuanced form of knowledge exchange that emerges from missionary circuits and settler-Indigenous relations. I develop a newly gendered understanding of the southern archive by considering how Schreiner’s literary presence in New Zealand facilitated the formation of another form of knowledge exchange grounded in a white, feminist literary network.