The Story of an African Farm (Broché)

Biographie d'Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was the major South African novelist to emerge in the late nineteenth century. She was the ninth of twelve children born to a German father and an English mother, and was raised as a strict Calvinist on a mission station. However, her religious faith wavered when she was still a young child. After her father was declared insolvent in 1866, she had to part from her parents.
Between the ages of 15 and 26 she held a succession of posts as a governess. Her spare time was devoted to writing stories, reading the major Victorian intellectuals, and developing her own distinctive brand of free-thought. Over a period of 8 years, Schreiner saved for her passage to Britain to find a publisher for "The Story of An African Farm" and to train in medicine. Greeted with enthusiasm in 1883, "African Farm" enabled Schreiner to forge a successful career as a polemical writer.
During the 1880s she formed close friendships with some of the most progressive intellectuals of the day, including Eleanor Marx, Edward Carpenter, and members of the Men and Women's Club. Deeply involved in Cape politics during the 1890s, she was passionately opposed to the second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). "Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland" (1897), the longest of her many allegories, is a swingeing attack on the expansionist policies of Cecil Rhodes.
Her highly popular "Dreams" (1891) were an inspiration to the suffrage movement. Similarly, "Woman and Labour" (1911) provided a powerful analysis of sexual inequality, influencing many interwar feminists such as Vera Brittain. Continually troubled by asthma, Schreiner's life was split between periods of convalescence and intense political campaigning. In 1894 she entered into an intermittently happy marriage to S.
C. Cronwright, an ostrich farmer. She died of heart-failure on 10 December 1920. Much of her work was published posthumously, including two novels started in the 1870s, "From Man to Man" (1926) and "Undine" (1929).