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Olive Schreiner

This chapter focuses on Olive Schreiner. Schreiner's work mediates the cultural politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in distinctive ways, demonstrating how the so-called colonial ‘margins’ were in fact often formative of metropolitan notions of social justice and progress. The position of women and the treatment of Africans were inseparable in Schreiner's thinking: in essays, campaigning polemic, short stories, and letters she sought to implicate metropolitan feminist aspiration in the arguments about race, labour, and class which dominated South African politics. The chapter examines these mediations in relation to Schreiner's three novels: Undine (1929), The Story of an African Farm (1883), and From Man to Man (1926). Of these, only The Story of an African Farm was published in her lifetime.

Oxford University Press

Carolyn Burdett

Oxford Scholarship Online

2018

Title: Olive Schreiner

Description:

This chapter focuses on Olive Schreiner.

Schreiner's work mediates the cultural politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in distinctive ways, demonstrating how the so-called colonial ‘margins’ were in fact often formative of metropolitan notions of social justice and progress.

The position of women and the treatment of Africans were inseparable in Schreiner's thinking: in essays, campaigning polemic, short stories, and letters she sought to implicate metropolitan feminist aspiration in the arguments about race, labour, and class which dominated South African politics.

The chapter examines these mediations in relation to Schreiner's three novels: Undine (1929), The Story of an African Farm (1883), and From Man to Man (1926).

Of these, only The Story of an African Farm was published in her lifetime.

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