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South African writer Olive Schreiner became internationally famous following the
success of her first novel,
Schreiner was born to a missionary couple, Gottlob Schreiner and Rebecca Lyndall, at Wittenberg mission station in South Africa on March 24 1855. Named for her three dead brothers, Oliver, Emile, and Albert, Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner was the ninth of twelve children. She spent most of her childhood moving between mission stations and received no formal education. The death of Schreiner’s sister Ellie in 1865 and a meeting with freethinker Willie Bertram in 1871 led to Schreiner’s rejection of religion.
Despite her limited education, Schreiner took up her first governess post in Cradock, South Africa, in 1870. Between 1872 and 1874 she lived with her brother and sister, Theo and Ettie, at the diamond fields in New Rush. She then returned to working as a governess for various families in the Northern and Eastern Cape from 1874 until 1881.
Starting in the early 1870s, Schreiner taught herself natural history, anthropology,
and philosophy, reading works by Charles Darwin, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Stuart
Mill, Herbert Spencer, and Carl Vogt. She also began work on all three of her novels:
Although Schreiner moved to England with the intention of becoming a nurse, her
chronic asthma prevented her from study. Instead, she focused on publishing
Schreiner was also in contact with various poets and writers associated with the aesthetic, symbolist, and naturalist movements in literature. These included Philip Bourke-Marston (1850-1887), Vernon Lee (1856-1935), Amy Levy (1861-1889), George Moore (1852-1933), and Arthur Symons(1865-1945). Symons’s accounts of conversations with Schreiner reveal her intent to create experimental, non-realist literature (see Cronwright-Schreiner 184-90).
Whilst travelling in England and Europe between 1887 and 1889, Schreiner worked on
various projects. She continued writing
Schreiner’s romantic relationships up until 1892 were unsuccessful. At seventeen,
she was involved in a mysterious and brief engagement to Julius Gau (1845-1927); in
England she rejected an offer of marriage from Donkin, and fell deeply in
(unrequited) love with Pearson. In 1892 Schreiner met an ostrich farmer, Samuel Cron
Cronwright, who was a fan of
From 1890 onwards, Schreiner increasingly focused on her political writings. She
published numerous articles in various journals between 1891-1900 on the nature of
Boers, various African races, and the English. Cronwright-Schreiner would later
collect these essays as
In response to the increasing hostilities between the Boers and English, Schreiner
produced an essay entitled “An English South African’s View of the Situation” (1899),
which spoke out against the coming conflict. She later wrote two short stories,
“Eighteen-Ninety-Nine” and “Nineteen Hundred and One,” which depicted the suffering
of women in war. They were published after her death in the collection Stories,
Whilst in South Africa, Schreiner moved in pacifist and feminist circles that
included Alice Greene (1858-1920), Emily Hobhouse (1860-1926), and Betty Molteno
(1852-1927). She also became directly supportive of progressive groups, including the
Social Democratic Federation in South Africa, and the Women’s Enfranchisement League.
In 1911 Schreiner published her feminist polemic,
Schreiner returned to England in 1913 for treatment for her asthma and was forced to
remain in London following the outbreak of the First World War. During this time
Schreiner became a supporter of Mahatma Gandhi’s
After living apart from his wife for five years, Cronwright-Schreiner came to England in July 1920 to see her. Despite her poor health, Schreiner returned alone to South Africa, and died in Wynberg, Cape Town, on December 10th 1920. She shares her final resting place on Buffelskop Mountain near Cradock with her husband, baby, and pet dog.
© 2012, Jade Munslow Ong
Jade Munslow Ong is a PhD student and Teaching Assistant in the English and American Studies department at the University of Manchester. She is working on a thesis entitled “Olive Schreiner: Primitivism, Gender and Empire.”