The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner

First published: 1883

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Social realism

Time of plot: 1880’s

Locale: South Africa

Principal characters

• Tant’ Sannie, a Boer farm woman
• Lyndall, her stepdaughter
• Em, Lyndall’s cousin
• Waldo, the son of a German overseer
• Bonaparte Blenkins, a hypocrite
• Gregory Rose, a young Englishman

The Story:

Shortly before the Englishman dies, he marries Tant’ Sannie, so that there will be someone to take care of his farm and his motherless daughter, Lyndall. Tant’ Sannie, a heavy, slow, and simple Boer woman, takes over the farm and the care of Lyndall and her cousin, Em. Most of the hard work is done by an old German, who lives with his young son in a small house nearby. The boy, Waldo, watches over the sheep and helps his father take charge of the black natives who do the heaviest work.

The farm lies in a dreary flat plain of red sand sparsely dotted with pale bushes. The sun always glitters in a blinding way on the zinc roofs of the buildings and on the stone walls of the enclosures for the animals. Life is monotonous and deadly. Tant’ Sannie sits in the farmhouse drinking coffee; the children play in a halfhearted way; young Waldo does his chores; and the German goes about seeing that things are as they should be.

Tant’ Sannie is asked by the Englishman to see that the two girls are educated, but she, believing only in the Bible, pays no attention to their demands for books. The two girls and Waldo find some old histories and study them when they can. Lyndall learns rapidly, for she is a quick, serious girl, fascinated especially by the story of Napoleon. Em is more quiet and reserved. Waldo is the strangest of the three. His father is deeply devout, with an innocent faith in the goodness of man and the mercy of God. He fills the boy’s head with frightening and overpowering ideas.

One day a visitor comes to the farm and asks for a night’s lodging. He introduces himself as Bonaparte Blenkins. Tant’ Sannie will have nothing to do with him, because he is English-speaking. The old German intercedes for the visitor, however, and finally wins Tant’ Sannie’s grudging permission for him to spend the night. The German cannot bear to pass up an opportunity to practice Christian charity.

Blenkins soon wins the German over completely with his fantastic tales of adventure and travel, and he even conquers Tant’ Sannie by the wonderful way he reads and preaches the service on Sunday. The children, however, are not fooled. Lyndall knows that the man is lying when he talks and that his religion is all hypocrisy. Nevertheless, Blenkins is soon installed on the farm as tutor to the children. After a few days, Lyndall walks out of class and refuses to return.

Blenkins slowly gains Tant’ Sannie’s esteem, until he feels that it is safe to try to get rid of the German and take over his job. With a trumped-up charge, he accuses the overseer to his mistress and stands by happily as the old German is ordered off the farm. Shocked the more deeply because of the support he gave Blenkins, the German goes to his house to pack up and leave. It is not in his nature to argue or to fight for his rights; what God sends must be accepted. In his grief he dies that night.

Blenkins takes over the farm. Like his namesake, he loves power and takes advantage of his new position. He orders Waldo about, beats him, and destroys the model for a sheep-shearing machine the boy made. None of these matters makes any impression on Tant’ Sannie. She thinks that Blenkins has a wonderful sense of humor, and daily he grows more and more valuable to her. She hopes someday to be his wife.

A visit by one of Tant’ Sannie’s nieces disillusions her. The niece is young, only a little overweight, and wealthy. One day Tant’ Sannie climbs up to the loft to see if everything there is neat, and she lets her maid take the ladder away. While she is there, Blenkins comes into the room below with the niece and begins to make love to her. Furious at Blenkins’s deception, Tant’ Sannie drops a barrel of salt meat on his head, almost knocking him out, and drenching him with pickle water. His stay on the farm is over.

When the children grow up, Lyndall has her way about going to the city to work and to study. Waldo begins to doubt the God he so terribly feared in his childhood, and Em grows to attractive, if not beautiful, womanhood. Tant’ Sannie rents part of the farm to a young Englishman named Gregory Rose, who soon falls in love with Em. It is the first time anyone pays much attention to the girl, and she is enraptured at the prospect of marriage. Tant’ Sannie thinks she herself might as well marry again, and she sends out word to the surrounding farms that she is looking for a husband.

Waldo eagerly awaits Lyndall’s return from the city. He wants to know what she discovered about the world and to tell her of his own problems. He learned wood carving. One day, while he was watching the sheep, a stranger approached to talk with him. After looking at one of Waldo’s carvings, the traveler told the boy a story of a man who searched for truth but found merely a creed until, just before his death, he caught a glimpse of his goal. The meeting was short but unforgettable. Waldo wants to go out into the world, to find the man again, to learn more about the search for truth.

When Lyndall returns, she is a different person. Waldo finds that he cannot talk with her as he did before. She learns the problems a woman faces in the world, and she refuses to be held down by the laws and restrictions that bind her. Neither Em nor Gregory Rose, her fiancé, can understand Lyndall. Gregory dislikes her at first, but he becomes more attracted to her as time passes. At Tant’ Sannie’s wedding feast—for she finds a widower who wants to marry again— Em discovers that she does not really love Gregory, and she asks him to forget the plans they made.

When Lyndall asks him to marry her—just to give her his name—Gregory consents. It is a long time before he discovers the reason. Lyndall made a friend in the city, a man who wants her to marry him, but she cannot stand the idea of being tied down by legal marriage. She wants freedom, not bondage. She feels that if she can threaten her lover with marriage to another man, she can get what she wants from him. Her plan works. When he receives a letter telling of her plans, he sets out at once to see her. Lyndall meets her friend secretly at the farm and goes away to live with him, but not as his wife.

Since Waldo, too, goes off to seek his way in the world, the farm is quiet for a time. Gregory does not know what to do about Lyndall’s disappearance. The longer she is away, the more he feels he loves her. At last he starts out to learn what became of her. As Gregory tracks Lyndall from town to town, he learns the story of a slowly fading love between the two people he is following. In time he finds Lyndall, lying sick in a hotel room, deserted by her lover. She had a child, but it died shortly after birth. Seeing her so weak and sick, Gregory wants to be near her, to care for her. Dressed as a woman, he is hired as Lyndall’s nurse. When she dies, he takes her body back to the farm for burial.

One night Em is startled by a knock on the door. Waldo has returned. He traveled much but learned little. Once he saw the stranger who talked to him so wonderfully about truth, but the man, not recognizing him, turned away. The first thing Waldo does is to sit down and begin a letter to Lyndall. When Em learns what he is doing, she tells him that Lyndall is dead.

Gregory still thinks of Lyndall and keeps as his greatest treasure the one letter he received from her, a letter that advised him to marry Em. In time, he asks Em again to be his wife, and she accepts. Waldo knows that Em feels she will have only half a husband, but he also knows that she never learned to hope for much, as he and Lyndall did. Waldo keeps one of Lyndall’s dancing shoes in his shirt. He spends much of his time wandering about the farm watching the insects and looking at the flowers. He wants to be like them, to die, to sleep in the same earth with Lyndall. One day, lying in the warm sunshine, he dies.

Bibliography

Berkman, Joyce Avrech. The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner: Beyond South African Colonialism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. Stresses Schreiner’s humanistic and progressive sociological views and discusses how they are represented in her fiction.

Burdett, Carolyn. Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism: Evolution, Gender, Empire. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Analyzes Schreiner’s work within the context of political events in South Africa in the 1890’s and the English feminist movement of the late nineteenth century.

Chrisman, Laura. “Empire, Race, and Feminism at the Fin de Siècle: The Works of George Egerton and Olive Schreiner.” In Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle, edited by Sally Ledger and Scott McCracken. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Examines Schreiner’s work in the light of the New Woman movement of the 1890’s and its contributions concerning gender and imperialism.

Clayton, Cherry. Olive Schreiner. New York: Twayne, 1997. Examination of Schreiner’s life and work, pointing out autobiographical elements in her fiction. Chronicles the development of her feminism and anticolonialism. Analyzes The Story of an African Farm and other works of fiction and nonfiction.

First, Ruth, with Ann Scott. Olive Schreiner. London: André Deutsch, 1980. Authoritative chronicle of Schreiner’s life and times, cowritten by an African National Congress activist, explores the relationship of Schreiner’s life to the history of her troubled nation.

Heilman, Ann. “Transitions and Transfigurations: Dreams (1890), The Story of an African Farm (1883), and From Man to Man (1926).” In New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird. New York: Manchester University Press, 2004. Feminist analysis of Schreiner’s fiction, describing how her work appropriated, parodied, feminized, and transformed traditional cultural ideas about femininity, allegory, and mythology.

Monsman, Gerald. Olive Schreiner’s Fiction: Landscape and Power. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1991. Examines Schreiner’s art in aesthetic terms, stressing her sensitivity to nature and her philosophical ambitions. Especially useful for interpreting Waldo’s aesthetic evolution and the development of Lyndall’s character.

Murphy, Patricia. “Dissolving the Boundaries: Temporal Subversion in The Story of an African Farm.” In Time Is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender, and the New Woman. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001. Focuses on Schreiner’s handling of time in the novel, describing how Schreiner adapted Victorian concepts about time to convey anxieties about the appearance of the “New Woman” and other gender issues.

Van Wyk Smith, Malvern, and Don MacLennan, eds. Olive Schreiner and After: Essays on Southern African Literature in Honour of Guy Butler. Cape Town, South Africa: D. Philip, 1983. Situates Schreiner in the tradition of white South African writing in English that she was crucial in founding.