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.