Biographical Overview

On 24 March 1855, Olive Emilie Albertina was born the ninth of twelve children to Gottlob and Rebecca Schreiner. Her German father and English mother, both missionaries in South Africa, provided a household grounded in a strict Calvinist tradition. Despite this rigid structure, however, Schreiner's upbringing was tumultuous at best. Gottlob Schreiner's failures in mission work as well as a number of businesses prompted chronic financial insecurity, catalyzing the family's disarray, eventual disunion and, significantly, Schreiner's separation from her parents at the age of twelve. After studying at a brother's school in Cradock for three years, Schreiner began working as a governess, an occupation she pursued for eleven years. As a child, she exhibited her precocity, challenging her parents' deep religious devotion and the family's deep religious roots. Such precocity again surfaced during her tenure as a governess, as she studied the works of a wide array of prominent Victorian intellectuals, wrote a considerable number of her own short stories, and began to develop her own social ideas -- ideas that would eventually brand her as a Victorian revolutionist. During this eight-year period as a governess, Schreiner saved enough to buy herself passage to England, where she hoped to study medicine.

In 1881 Schreiner arrived in England, abandoned her initial aspirations of becoming a medical doctor because of her own poor health, and, for the second time, sought publication of her book, The Story of an African Farm. Chapman and Hall's acceptance of the novel in 1883 marked a landmark in Schreiner's career as a novelist and later, as a social activist. The novel's immediate success, which persisted throughout her lifetime, provided her acceptance among a group of revolutionary and, at the time, infamous thinkers. Thereafter, Schreiner began to associate with a distinguished group of intellectuals, not only exposing herself to England's literary and intellectual élite, but introducing and expounding her own social ideas as well.

She returned to South Africa in 1889 and met her husband, Samuel Cronwright, three years later. After meeting Cronwright and before the outbreak of the Anglo-Boer War in 1899, Schreiner suffered the loss of her first child (a tragedy that emerges prominently in her later fiction) and published a considerable number of fictional pieces as well as political essays. Schreiner's intellectual role escalated to that of an outspoken, oftentimes revolutionary political leader. Her political and literary work included tracts opposing Cecil Rhodes' colonialist activities in Africa as well as England's involvement in the Anglo-Boer War. Her political activism in the twentieth century included further polemical writing, her participation in women's suffrage groups, and a stalwart pacifistic stance against the outbreak of World War I.

Undoubtedly, scholarly treatment of Schreiner's fiction during the last twenty years has undermined her political writings considerably. Quite simply, Schreiner's fiction lacks the straightforwardness of her political writing and reveals her own ambivalence towards native South Africans. As a result, criticism of her fiction ranges from sympathy to disdain. Whereas critics such as Joyce Avrech Berkman in The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner provide relatively sympathetic frameworks, emphasizing the revolutionary, anti-imperialist nature of Schreiner's fiction, critics such as Anne McClintock in Imperial Leather underscore Schreiner's negative representation of natives as indicative of an inherent contradiction, which blemishes the novelist's work. Regardless of such critical discourse, Schreiner's life and writing provide invaluable exposure to both the latter stages of the colonialist movement in South Africa and one vigilant woman's discourse, however ambivalent, against late nineteenth-century, early twentieth-century imperialism, war, and oppression of women.

Link to a chronology of Olive Schreiner from The Story of an African Farm (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1992. xxxiii-xxxvi).

Bibliography

Secondary Materials

Albinski, Nan Bowman. "'The Law of Justice, of Nature, and of Right:' Victorian Feminist
Utopias." Feminism, Utopia, and Narrative. Ed. Libby Falk Jones, et al. Knoxville: U of
Tennessee P, 1990.
Barash, Carol L. "Virile Womanhood: Olive Schreiner's Narratives of a Master Race." Speaking of Gender. Ed. Elaine Showalter. New York: Routledge, 1989.
Barsby, Christine. "Olive Schreiner: Towards a Redefinition of Culture." Pretexts 1.1 (1989): 18-39.
Beeton, D. R. Facets of Olive Schreiner. Craighall: Donker, 1987.
Berkman, Joyce Avrech. The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African
Colonialism. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1989.
Bolin, Bill. "Olive Schreiner and the Status Quo." Unisa English Studies 31.1 (1993): 4-8.
Bradford, Helen. "Olive Schreiner's Hidden Agony: Fact, Fiction and Teenage Abortion." Journal of South African Studies 21.4 (1995): 623-41.
Burdett, Carolyn. Olive Schreiner: Hidden Motives. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995.
Clayton, Cherry. "Forms of Dependence and Control in Olive Schreiner's Fiction." Olive Schreiner and After. Ed. Malvern van Wyk Smith, et al. Capetown: David Philip, 1983.
---. "Olive Schreiner: Life into Fiction." English in Africa 12.1 (1985): 29-39.
---. "Olive Schreiner: Paradoxical Pioneer." Women and Writing in South Africa: A Critical
Anthology. Ed. Cherry Clayton. Marshalltown: Heinemann Southern Africa, 1989.
---. "Women Writers and the Law of the Father: Race and Gender in the Fiction of Olive Schreiner, Pauline Smith and Sarah Gertrude Millin." English Academy Review 7 (1990): 99-117.
Coetzee, J. M. "Farm Novel and Plaasroman in South Africa." English in Africa 13.2 (1986): 1-19.
Cronwright-Schreiner, S. C. The Life of Olive Schreiner. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company,
1924.
Davenport, Rodney. "Olive Schreiner and South African Politics." Olive Schreiner and After. Ed.
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Donaldson, Laura E. "(ex)Changing (wo)Man: Towards a Materialist-Feminist Semiotics." Cultural Critique 11 (1988- 89): 5-23.
First, Ruth. Olive Schreiner. New York: Schocken Books, 1980.
Gorak, Irene E. "Olive Schreiner's Colonial Allegory: The Story of an African Farm." ARIEL 23.4 (1992): 53-72.
Horton, Susan R. Difficult Women, Artful Lives: Olive Schreiner and Isak Dinesen. Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins UP, 1995.
Jacob, Susan. "Sharers in a Common Hell: The Colonial Text in Schreiner, Conrad, and Lessing." The Literary Criterion 23.4 (1988): 84-92.
Lenta, Margaret. "Racism, Sexism, and Olive Schreiner's Fiction." Theoria 70 (1987): 15-30.
Lerner, Laurence. "Olive Schreiner and the Feminists." Olive Schreiner and After. Ed. Malvern van Wyk Smith, et al. Capetown: David Philip, 1983.
McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather. New York: Routledge, 1995.
McMurry, Andrew. "Figures in a Ground: An Ecofeminist Study of Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm." English Studies in Canada 20.4 (1994): 431-48.
Monsman, Gerald. "Olive Schreiner's Allegorical Vision." Victorian Review 18.2 (1992): 49-62.
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---. Olive Schreiner's Fiction: Landscape and Power. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1991.
---. "Writing the Self on the Imperial Frontier: Olive Schreiner and the Stories of Africa." Bucknell Review 37.1 (1993): 134-55.
Paxton, Nancy L. "The Story of an African Farm and the Dynamics of Woman-to-Woman Influences." Texas Studies in Literature and Language 30.4 (1988): 562-82.
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Winkler, Barbara Scott. "Victorian Daughters: The Lives and Feminism of Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Olive Schreiner." Critical Essays on Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Ed. Joanne B. Karpinski. New York: G. R. Hall, 1992.

Author: Daniel Alig, Fall 1996

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(Image of an "Homme Carrefour" from Donald J. Cosentino's Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou [Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1995].)