ABSTRACT
Olive Schreiner is best known today for her extraordinary novel The Story of an African Farm (1883), and for the pathbreaking feminist theory of Woman and Labour (1911).1 Between these two books, however, she published a sizeable quantity of work, ranging from a collection of short allegories, Dreams (1890), to a major series of articles on the politics and history of her native South Africa, later anthologised as Thoughts on South Africa (1923).2 Approximately half of her working life was spent in Europe, the site of composition for most of Dreams. Schreiner's achievement as a radical writer traverses both metropolitan and colonial cultures, both fiction and theory. To separate these spheres, however, is to lose sight of the fact that they are constantly in dialogue throughout Schreiner's oeuvre. My intention here is to focus upon a relatively neglected, but formative, period of Schreiner's development, her work of the I 880s. Dreams enjoyed tremendous and diverse popularity on publication, when it was acclaimed by, and claimed for, both aestheticism (via its chief ideologue Arthur Symons) and feminism (it was a favourite for imprisoned suffragettes), and went through 25 editions in 40 years.3 The importance of Dreams for the late nineteenth century, as Symons and Constance Lytton attest, is equally in terms of aesthetics and political thought.4 The volume needs to be recognised as a significant feminist intervention in the crises which generated on the one hand the romantic and democratic work of Edward Carpenter and on the other the "scientific" and eugenic work of the social scientist Karl Pearson. Both men were close friends of Schreiner, who liked to characterise them as polar opposites.5 But whatever their differences, both stand guilty (in divergent ways) of a masculinism which allows no real space or legitimacy for the specificities, and differences, of Western women. It is this space which Schreiner tried to explore in Dreams.
