Dreaming of Liberty: Olive Schreiner’s Ambivalent Anarchism

Schreiner may have rejected the tenets of political anarchism, but her letters document an ambivalent attitude to anarchism’s more capacious intellectual purview. This chapter probes the anarcho-aesthetic framing of Schreiner’s fiction within British and American anarchist print and publishing networks in the 1880s and 1890s. By tracing Schreiner and her works through British and American anarchist newspapers such as Freedom and the Boston paper Liberty, new politicised entry-points to Schreiner’s works are revealed, including the ideological importance of her allegorical form for individualist forms of anarchism that were developing on both sides of the Atlantic in this period. The chapter also casts light on the anarchic distribution practices of American anarchists such as Benjamin R. Tucker and Sarah E. Holmes, who put out editions of Schreiner’s works in formats and through channels that circumvented mainstream publishing networks, including Schreiner’s formal publishing arrangements with the American publisher, Roberts Brothers. Schreiner’s ambivalent anarchism are therefore situated within broader debates about international copyright to include a consideration of the anarchy of piracy, a practice which bypasses the structures of what Schreiner herself described as the ‘capitalist rings’ of publishing and bookselling.