Olive Schreiner

South African novelist and essayist

• Born: March 24, 1855
• Birthplace: Wittebergen Mission Station, Cape Colony (now in South Africa)
• Died: December 10/11, 1920
• Place of death: Cape Town, South Africa

Schreiner wrote not only what is considered to be the first major novel to emerge from the British Empire—The Story of an African Farm—but also polemical essays that are regarded as pioneering feminist works and incisive critiques of colonialism.

Early Life

Olive Schreiner (SHRI-ner) was the ninth of twelve children of Methodist missionaries working in South Africa’s Cape Colony. Her father, Gottlob Schreiner, was a German, and her mother, Rebecca Lyndall, was English. Olive was given three names, Olive Emilie Albertina, in honor of three previous siblings who had died in infancy.

Olive grew up in remote mission outposts in the Cape Colony. In 1861, her family moved to Healdtown when her father was appointed head of the Wesleyan Native Industrial Training Institution there. Four years later, he was dismissed from that position for violating mission rules on trading practices and entered private business but failed. The family’s poor financial situation forced Olive to leave home at the age of twelve to work as a servant in the households of friends and relatives. From 1871 to 1880, she worked as a governess on isolated farms of Afrikaners. Early settlers of primarily Dutch descent, the Afrikaners were generally known as “Boers” after the Dutch word for farmer. Olive’s experience of living among Afrikaner farmers would later help shape her fiction and color her attitude toward the South African (Boer) War of 1899-1902.

At an early age Olive questioned traditional religious beliefs to the dismay of her devout parents. She had no formal education apart from fragmented lessons given by her mother, but she found time while she worked as a governess to explore books by such great humanistic, scientific, and philosophical writers as Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, John Stuart Mill, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Carlyle, and many others. While educating herself during her ten years on Afrikaner farms, she also started writing fiction, and her finest novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), grew out of that period. By 1881, she had saved enough money for passage to England. At the age of twenty-six, she left the Cape Colony with her manuscripts in hand.

Life’s Work

Schreiner originally intended to study medicine in London, but her serious asthma intervened. Instead, she set out on a literary career, beginning in 1883 with publication of The Story of an African Farm. Appearing first under the very masculine pseudonym “Ralph Iron,” the book met with success as well as controversy over its feminist views, didacticism, and religious skepticism. Because the novel was criticized for its loose structure and clumsy plot construction, Schreiner wrote a preface for the second edition, which bore her own name. She defended the novel by arguing that her writing method followed life just as it unfolds in unpredictable stages.

The book’s reception gained Schreiner admission into liberal political and literary circles, where she met other young radicals, including Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor Marx; Irish novelist George Moore; British writer and activist Henry Rider Haggard, who had worked in South Africa and was the author of the African novel King Solomon’s Mines (1885); and Welsh poet Arthur Symons. In 1883, she met the noted psychologist and sexologist Havelock Ellis, with whom she formed a lifelong friendship. Their extensive correspondence would be published in 1992.

After leaving London, Schreiner traveled briefly in Italy, then returned to South Africa in 1889 and settled in the remote village of Matjesfontein for the sake of her health. No longer branded as the indigent daughter of a disgraced missionary, Schreiner had gained a considerable reputation in South Africa as the result of her literary success in England.

In 1894, Schreiner married Samuel Cron Cronwright, a gentleman farmer and businessperson. Undertaking an exceptional move for the time, he assumed her surname and was known thereafter as Cronwright-Schreiner. A year later, Schreiner bore a daughter who lived for only sixteen hours. The loss of her child was a devastating experience that affected Schreiner for the rest of her life. Meanwhile, her husband gave up his own work to assist her in her literary career. According to the devoted husband’s biography, The Life of Olive Schreiner (1924), his efforts on Schreiner’s behalf often caused him frustration because of Schreiner’s mercurial moods, eccentricities, and lack of discipline. Schreiner also continued to suffer from asthma and at times depended on narcotics for relief. Long periods of separation marked their stressful marriage.

In the polemical books and articles that Schreiner wrote over the years, she addressed a variety of causes and issues, including pacifism, socialism, imperialism, sexism, feminism, and racism. In 1897, she published a strongly political novel, Peter Halket of Mashonaland , that was a thinly veiled attack on the racial policies promoted by Cecil Rhodes’s British South Africa Company, which had a royal charter to colonize what is now Zimbabwe. Although Schreiner was initially a friend and admirer of the empire builder, she stressed her sympathy for the exploited African population and indirectly accused Rhodes of advocating extermination of his company’s African subjects.

In 1899, Schreiner’s longtime partiality for Afrikaners led her to publish An English South African’s View of the Situation , a pro-Afrikaner tract objecting to Great Britain’s prosecution of the South African War. Because of her views, the British government placed her under martial law in 1900. Another work of Schreiner’s that is still considered a significant feminist treatise, Woman and Labour , appeared in 1911. In that book, Schreiner argues that technology has robbed women of their work and a rightful place in the social structure, thereby turning them into parasites and passive sexual creatures. She pleads for a full understanding of the role women should play as equal partners with men.

Schreiner spent the years of World War I in London, where her health deteriorated. After the war, her husband, Cronwright-Schreiner, went to England to bring her back to Cape Town. On December 10, 1920, several months after she returned to South Africa, Schreiner died from a heart attack, at the age of sixty-five. At the time of her death, she left unfinished a novel that she had worked on for over forty years, From Man to Man . Cronwright-Schreiner edited this ambitious chronicle of two subjugated women and published it in 1926. Three years later, he published his edited version of Schreiner’s unfinished novella Undine .

Significance

Far ahead of her time, Olive Schreiner was a feminist trailblazer, a pioneering imperial critic, and an inventive novelist. Her views on the role of the new woman in society inspired some readers and offended others when her feminist writings first appeared, but during the half century after she died, her writings containing contentious proposals for equal status for women fell into oblivion. However, after the modern feminist movement gained momentum, Schreiner finally claimed her rightful place as a forerunner in the cause of women’s rights. Numerous books and essays on her work by modern feminist critics underscore the importance of Schreiner’s original contributions to the field.

After the dissolution of the British Empire, historians and literary theorists have devoted considerable energy to investigating colonial vestiges—the element of racism in particular. Schreiner initiated this discussion in her writings about South Africa’s racial division and foresaw its catastrophic outcome. Although novels by other writers from the British Empire appeared before The Story of an African Farm, those works recorded colonial life in a realistic mode that imitated traditional British fiction. In sharp contrast, Schreiner devised a striking narrative technique to transform the colonial experience and the landscape itself into a metaphor that speaks for the human condition in all of its complexity. Her retelling of ordinary events on a remote farm in Africa is generally considered the first significant novel to come out of the far-flung empire.

Bibliography

Berkman, Joyce Avrech. The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. Focuses on Schreiner’s ideas, not on her life. Considers how political conflicts and intellectual currents formed her thinking and underscored her writing.

Burdett, Carolyn. Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Places Schreiner’s work within a historical context by tracing the complex relationship between gender and empire. Relates how the discussion of women’s rights in England during the late nineteenth century and the South African War affected Schreiner’s writing.

Chrisman, Laura. Rereading the Imperial Romance: British Imperialism and South African Resistance in Haggard, Schreiner, and Plaatje. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 2000. Investigates the historical experience of British imperialism in Africa through analyses of three writers who viewed imperialism in different ways. Sees Schreiner as focusing on the economic and materialistic aspects.

Clayton, Cherry. Olive Schreiner. New York: Twayne, 1997. Provides a succinct introduction to Schreiner’s life and fiction, which is analyzed from a biographical standpoint.

Cronwright-Schreiner, Samuel Cron. The Life of Olive Schreiner. 1924. New York: Haskell House, 1973. Reprint of the biography of Schreiner by her husband that provides anecdotes about Schreiner’s idiosyncrasies, firsthand accounts of incidents in her life, recollections of his devotion to her, and a broad analysis of her writing.

Heilman, Ann. New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, and Mona Caird. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2004. Explores how three women writers drew on, imitated, feminized, and altered the traditional literary devices, such as femininity, mythology, and allegory.

Horton, Susan. Difficult Women, Artful Lives: Olive Schreiner and Isak Denisen—In and Out of Africa. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Examines the life and work of two unconventional women who wrote about Africa, placing their themes of race, gender and nationality strictly within the context of Africa.

Monsman, Gerald. Olive Schreiner’s Fiction: Landscape and Power. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Provides a thorough and perceptive analysis of Schreiner’s fiction to illustrate how she rendered the South African landscape to underscore the way colonialism exerted power over its subjects.

Stanley, Liz. Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman: Olive Schreiner’s Social Theory. Durham, England: Sociology Press, 2002. Recapitulates Schreiner’s role as the major feminist theorist of her time, through an original reading and critique of her political and feminist writings.