ABSTRACT
The South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner, who lived in Britain for long periods as well as South Africa, was in her day one of the world's most famous people. The company she kept in a literal network sense included many well-known figures in Sociology and other social sciences and her analytical concerns are clearly of sociological import and yet there were at the time and still are now issues concerning where and how to locate her in relation to Sociology as a body of ideas and a way of thinking, and also as a discipline. The earliest known intellectual influence on Schreiner was sociological in character and came from Herbert Spencer's First Principles. She encountered this in 1871 while staying with her aunt Elizabeth, married to the missionary Samuel Rolland. The Rolland's lived at Beersheba on the frontier of the now-Lesotho, and a chance passing visitor left his copy of First Principles with her.
