Olive Schreiner
1884: Shortly After Publication of The Story of an African Farm
University of Cape Town Libraries
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).
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.
Malvern van Wyk Smith, et al. Capetown: David Philip, 1983.
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.
---. "Olive Schreiner: Literature and the Politics of Power."
Texas Studies in Literature and
Language 30.4 (1988): 583- 610.
---. 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.
Pechey, Graham. "The Story of an African Farm: Colonial History
and the Discontinuous Text."
Critical Arts 3.1 (1983): 65- 78.
Scherzinger, Karen. "The Problem of the Pure Woman: South African
Pastorialism and Female
Rites of Passage." Unisa English Studies 29.2 (1991): 29-35.
Steele, Murray. "A Humanist Bible: Gender Roles, Sexuality and Race
in Olive Schreiner's From
Man to Man." Gender Roles and Sexuality in Victorian Literature.
Ed. Christopher Parker.
Hants: Scolar, 1995.
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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