The Story of an African Farm

THE STORY OF AN AFRICAN FARM

OLIVE SCHREINER

INTRODUCTION BY ANDREW VAN DER VLIES

Introduction and Suggested Reading © 2005 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-6691-3

INTRODUCTION

THE Story of an African Farm (1883) is an exhilarating performance utterly unlike anything British readers had previously encountered from South Africa. Instead of the usual romances featuring hazardous journeys, wild animals, or encounters with Zulu warriors, this work offers a picture of colonial life that is both comic and tragic, prosaic and haunting. The novel is set on a farm in the Karoo, the arid high plateau which occupies much of the interior of what was then the Cape Colony. The novel begins in the late 1850s and concludes in 1867, when Southern Africa was on the verge of capitalization and industrialization, which followed the discovery of diamonds that year. This, of course, was followed by social and political upheavals. The novel charts several years in the lives of the farm’s three children: Waldo, the son of the German overseer; Em, English stepdaughter of the farm’s tyrannical trustee, a Boer woman called Tant (Aunt) Sannie; and Em’s orphan cousin, Lyndall. The novel confronted many of late-Victorian society’s most profound anxieties about faith and gender. Its boldness was heightened by the facts that its author, Olive Schreiner, was a woman (her identity only briefly disguised by a suitably masculine-sounding pseudonym, “Ralph Iron”), and that she was from the colonies. Not only did The Story of an African Farm introduce the so-called “New Woman” into English literature, changing the course of late-nineteenth-century fiction and providing a rallying cry for proto-feminist thinkers, Schreiner’s novel is also widely regarded as a central text in the development of South African literature in English.

Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner (1855-1920) was born on March 24, 1855, at Wittebergen, on the Cape Colony’s mountainous northeastern border with Basutoland (Lesotho), the ninth of twelve children of English-born Rebecca (neé Lyndall) and German-born Gottlob Schreiner, a missionary couple sent to Southern Africa by the interdenominational London Missionary Society in the late 1830s. In 1866, following her father’s dismissal and bankruptcy, the family dispersed, and Olive lived with older siblings and family friends across the interior of the colony. She started her first novel, the posthumously published Undine (1929), while at the Kimberley diamond diggings in 1872, and began writing both The Story of an African Farm and what became From Man to Man (1926) sometime after 1874, while serving as governess on farms in the Eastern Cape. Hoping to study for a medical career, Schreiner left for Britain in 1881. Her health proved too fragile, however, and she settled in London, where she soon began moving in progressive intellectual circles and became intimate friends with leading radical thinkers and writers, including “sexologist” Havelock Ellis, eugenicist psychologist Karl Pearson, and Karl Marx’s daughter, Eleanor. The Story of an African Farm was accepted by the respected London publishing firm Chapman and Hall in early 1882, and appeared the following January to much acclaim. It soon became widely and highly regarded and sold more than 100,000 copies over the following twenty years.