Like so many nineteenth-century writers from the further reaches of the British Empire, Schreiner regarded Britain as an intellectual home, but struggled to balance a desire for metropolitan validation of her work with a deeply felt commitment to South Africa (then a purely geographical designation, and only a single political entity after 1910), the only place in which she felt fully creatively inspired. Her adult life was spent negotiating the demands of these transnational identifications: in Europe, she longed to be in South Africa, but when there, she railed against its narrow-minded colonial parochialism. Schreiner returned to the Cape Colony in October 1889, and after a short return visit to Britain in 1893, married Eastern Cape farmer-politician Samuel Cronwright (who subsequently styled himself Cronwright-Schreiner) in 1894. The couple lived in the Karoo, then in Kimberley, and finally in Johannesburg (in the independent Dutch “South African Republic”), before moving back to the Cape Colony at the outbreak of the Second Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902). They were among the most prominent pro-Boer figures in the Cape during this turbulent period, and Schreiner endured years of virtual house arrest under British martial law. She became a passionate advocate of women’s and “native” rights in advance of the formation of the Union of South Africa, published a hugely influential polemical plea for women’s rights, Woman and Labour, in 1911, and spent the years between 1913 and 1920 as a widely fêted and highly regarded suffragette and pacifist in London. She died, in Cape Town, shortly after returning to South Africa in late 1920.

Cronwright-Schreiner published a Life of his late wife, and a heavily edited collection of her Letters, in 1924, both of which exercised a powerful -- and many argue pernicious -- influence on her reputation for at least two generations, until the publication of British psychoanalytic feminist Ann Scott and South African activist and writer Ruth First’s impressively authoritative biography in 1980. Cronwright-Schreiner’s picture of his wife was of a demanding, frail, childlike, otherworldly, and faintly hysterical genius, who struggled in vain to produce a worthy successor to The Story of an African Farm. It is true that her other novels were left unfinished at her death (and partly “reconstructed” by Cronwright-Schreiner before publication), but Schreiner produced highly influential allegorical stories about gender inequality and the iniquity of colonial expansion, including the hugely popular Dreams (1890), and scandalous Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), as well as numerous political pamphlets and essays. South African novelist and Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer is not alone, however, in venturing the suggestion -- clearly informed by the privileging of an anti-apartheid rather than strictly feminist agenda in her own work -- that with her lesser works, Schreiner squandered her creative energies, giving up the search for modes of fictional expression equal to the South African reality. Whatever truth there might be in this claim (and readers of Schreiner’s complete body of work should decide for themselves), The Story of an African Farm stands as a bold expression, against tremendous odds, of forward-thinking views on the “woman question,” late-Victorian crises of faith, and the power structures of late-nineteenth-century South African colonial life.