ABSTRACT
Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner was born in Wittebergen, in present-day Lesotho, on March 24, 1855. Her parents, Gottlob Schreiner and Rebecca Lyndall, were missionaries who had been sent out from England; the father was originally of German extraction. Critics have noted the significance of the fact that Schreiner used her mother’s maiden name as the first name of the heroine in her most famous novel, The Story of an African Farm. Schreiner grew up in the Cape Colony of South Africa and had a precocious childhood, much like those enjoyed by the heroines of her two major novels. In her midteenage years, she began to be involved in intellectual debates, which provoked her permanent repudiation of her parents’ Christianity. In 1874 she began to write seriously, beginning all her major works, including From Man to Man, which remained unfinished at her death. Continuing an ambitious program of reading and self-discovery, she also gradually saved money for a trip to England, which finally occurred in 1881. Here she submitted The Story of an African Farm to publishers; it was accepted by Chapman and Hall in 1883. The novel proved tremendously popular and brought Schreiner wide friendship and acceptance in various maverick and freethinking circles, which included figures such as the sexologist Havelock Ellis and the socialist and homosexual activist Edward Carpenter. Schreiner, as a person as well as an artist, was from here on of two worlds: the advanced and trendy world of symbolist London as well as the provincial and stultifying colonial milieu of South Africa, which nonetheless remained the homeland of Schreiner’s heart.
