Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner (b. 1855–d. 1920) was the first internationally successful South African writer. She was also the author of the first New Woman novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883). Born in the eastern Cape Colony (modern day South Africa), she was the ninth of twelve children. Her father was a German missionary, her mother was English, and the family struggled financially. Though Schreiner received no formal education, she read widely and began writing her first novel (the posthumously published From Man to Man or Perhaps Only, which she never completed) while still in her teens. Before she left South Africa for Britain in 1881, she had completed two novels, Undine (also published posthumously) and The Story of an African Farm. Though Schreiner went to Britain to pursue a medical education, her asthma compelled her to abandon that goal. Instead, she sought and eventually found a publisher for The Story of an African Farm. Published under the pseudonym Ralph Iron, the novel was an immediate success. Her real identity soon became known and Schreiner, now something of a celebrity, stayed in England (with some travel in Europe), mixing with other progressive thinkers, for several more years. She spent the decade before and after the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) in South Africa. During these years, she published allegories, short fiction, and political writing, including Woman and Labour (1911), which historicizes, theorizes, and asserts the social value of women’s productive labor and explodes the separate spheres ideology. She married, had a child (who lived for less than twenty-four hours), and, in 1913, went back to England (without her husband). In 1920, not long after returning (again) to South Africa, Schreiner died of heart disease. Her reputation has endured in South Africa, but in the half century between her death and the rise of Second Wave feminism, she received little attention elsewhere. Feminist and postcolonial scholarship has given her reputation new life, and if she began the turn of the twenty-first century “poised on the cusp of canonicity” (Patricia Murphy, “Dissolving the Boundaries: Temporal Subversion in The Story of an African Farm,” p. 253 n. 3, cited under The Story of an African Farm: Genre and Form), she has since crossed its threshold.