Olive Schreiner ( 1855-1920  )

 

a South African Anglophone novelist and radical feminist, was born on a missionary station in South Africa in 1855 as the ninth child of Gottlob Schreiner, a German Methodist missionary, and Rebecca Schreiner née Lyndall, the daughter of a London Congregational minister. Young Olive was raised in a strict Calvinist tradition in the remote mission stations of the Cape Colony. The family was financially unstable and Olive at fifteen left home and worked as a governess and nurse for wealthy Afrikaner families in the Cape Colony. After a crisis of faith, she became estranged from her zealously religious parents. For the next few years years she experienced sexual harassment and denigration that haunted her for a long time. Besides, in adolescence she contracted asthma that impaired her breathing for the rest of her life.

Although Olive Schreiner did not receive formal education,  Emerson. As a teenager Olive started to write her most successful novel, The Story of an African Farm. In 1880, she sent the completed manuscript to her friends, Mary and John Brown in England, asking them to find a publisher for her novel. The Browns sent the manuscript to the Edinburgh publisher David Douglas, who recommended substantial editing and alterations of the text. Schreiner sent the revised manuscript to several publishers, but they refused to publish it.Chapman and Hall, published the novel under the pseudonym Ralph Iron in 1883. The Story of an African Farm, which had 15 editions during Schreiner's lifetime, is considered South Africa's first important novel. Schreiner wrote two other novels, Undine (drafted 1874 and published posthumously in 1929), and From Man To Man; or, Perhaps Only (drafted in 1885 and published posthumously in 1929). All these novels deal mainly with the gender relations, as well as sexual, racial and class oppression.

Schreiner published her pro-Boer views in “An English South African Woman's View of the Situation” (1899), which caused embarrassment to her brother Will, then Prime Minister of the Cape Colony. She also criticised the British invasion of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, and as a result, was interned for a year.

In 1911, Schreiner published Women and Labour, a plea for women's emancipation, and one of the most important feminist texts of the early twentieth century. In 1913, she decided to go Italy for medical treatment, but finally arrived in England, where she spent six years, visiting occasionally her lifelong friend, Havelock Ellis, and his wife Edith, who died in 1916. At that time she wrote passionate antiwar pamphlets. In 1920, Schreiner returned to South Africa and died of heart attack in Cape Town in December that year.

ANTOINETT   ; WIDE SARGASSO SEA

Wide sargassso sea of jean Rhys attempts to fill the blank of a fictional charecters life style. Rhys creates a biography for bertha mason. the insane wife of Edward Rochester Charlotte Bronte's  novel jane eyre
Rhys creates a prehistory for Bronte's character, tracing her development from a young solitary girl in Jamaica to a love-depraved lunatic in an English garret. By fleshing out Brontë's one-dimensional madwoman, Rhys enables us to sympathize with the mental and emotional decline of a human being. Antoinette is a far cry from the conventional female heroines of nineteenth- and even twentieth-century novels, who are often more rational and self-restrained (as is Jane Eyre herself). In Antoinette, by contrast, we see the potential dangers of a wild imagination and an acute
 sensitivity. Her restlessness and instability seem to stem, in some part, from her inability to belong to any particular community. As a white Creole, she straddles the European world of ancestorsCaribbean culture into which she is born. She Left mainly to her own devices as a child, Antoinette turns inward, finding there a world that can be both peaceful and terrifying. In the first part of the novel we witness the development of a delicate child—one who finds refuge in the closed, isolated life of the convent. Her arranged marriage distresses her, and she tries to call it off, feeling instinctively that she will be hurt. Indeed, the marriage is a mismatch of culture and custom. She and her English husband, Mr. Rochester, fail to relate to one another; and her past deeds, specifically her childhood relationship with a half-caste brother, sullies her husband's view of her. An exile within her own family, a "white cockroach" to her disdainful servants, and an oddity in the eyes of her own husband, Antoinette cannot find a peaceful place for herself. Going far beyond the pitying stance taken by Bronte, Rhys humanizes "Bertha's" tragic condition, inviting the reader to explore Antoinette's terror and anguish.

                 Bertha mason; JANE EYRE

Jane Eyre by charlotte  bront one of  the great work to english literature.Bertha mason is the protagonist of this novel, lived in jamaica as the daughter of very wealthy family. we get painful experience of her past  life not from her own perspectives; but from the hatred description of her unsatisfied husband, Edward Rochester .Bertha Mason: is she an abused wife, or just "the madwoman in the attic"?

Bertha’s family heritage is complex and puts her in a difficult position. She’s half-Creole and half-English, raised in Jamaica among the British aristocrat half of her family, and already not exactly a part of one world or the other.
She also suffers from congenital insanity . Rochester claims that she was drunken and promiscuous and that her excesses brought on her madness when she was young, but he’s not exactly an objective witness.It’s clear that she and Rochester never really got along and that they hadn’t gotten to know each other at all before they got married. In that sense, they were both screwed over by their families; they were young and silly, and neither of them really thought to slow down and thithey were young and silly, and neither of them really thought to slow down and think about things before saying their vows. As a result of all this, Bertha spends most of her adult life locked in a room—a few years in a room in Jamaica, and ten years in the attic at Thornfield. We don’t know about you, but we’d hate the person who did that to us, too.Bertha’s homicidal pyromaniac reaction, however, is admittedly a wee bit extreme. The fact that she crawls around on all fours making animalistic noises and laughing in a creepy way also suggests that the thread of her sanity has long since snapped. However, she’s still perceptive in some ways: she figures out that Rochester and Jane are going to get married, and she shows herself to Jane by destroying her wedding veil, trying, perhaps to warn her off gently, or at least signal to her that a marriage to Rochester isn’t going to work.
Oh, and she's also, um, kind of unkempt:
"And how were [Bertha's visage and features]?"
"Fearful and ghastly to me—oh, sir, I never saw a face like it! It was a discoloured face—it was a savage face. I wish I could forget the roll of the red eyes and the fearful blackened inflation of the lineaments!"
"Ghosts are usually pale, Jane."
Of course, Jane isn't just noting Bertha's (admittedly creepy) rolling bloodshot eyes and dramatically raised eyebrows. She's very problematically being terrified of Bertha's skin color, which is dark.

 Obviously, this has a lot of interesting implications for Bertha as a character, for Charlotte Brontë as an author, and for the "Autobiography" of Jane Eyre.

For Charlotte Brontë, Bertha seems to become a strange kind of alter-ego. Bertha is rejected by the man who was supposed to love her; Charlotte fell in love with an unattainable man (Constantin Heger). Bertha is kept prisoner in a lonely house on the English moors; Charlotte traveled a little, but spent most of her life shut up in her father’s house in Yorkshire, away from any big-city culture. Bertha is only able to show her powers to the world in what seem like insane, destructive ways; women novelists were common but their works were often considered ridiculous and their abilities inferior to those of men. The parallels are too strong to ignore, and perhaps Bertha does double-duty, both representing the restrictions that Charlotte felt and becoming Charlotte’s wish-fulfillment of breaking through those restrictions to inspire fear and awe.
 who narrates this entire novel and describes it as her "autobiography." Could Bertha represent Jane if she’s also Jane’s antagonist? Of course! We’re never more like someone than when we consider them our mortal enemy.
Think about it: Bertha is locked in a room for ten years and goes crazy "like some wild animal"; Jane is locked in the red room for five minutes and completely freaks out so that she’s "like a mad cat." Bertha sneaks around Thornfield at night to thwart Rochester’s plans of remarrying; Jane sneaks around Thornfield at night to thwart Rochester’s plans of using her to commit bigamy. Bertha’s supposed to be insane; Jane hears voices.
So here’s the thing: if Jane and Bertha are actually very similar, and if Bertha’s pyromaniac madness represents the incendiary potential of the woman writer telling her story, then it seems entirely possible that Jane could end up like Bertha, but that Jane just has the good fortune of being a little more desirable to Rochester and thus escapes Bertha’s fate.