The manuscript of The Story of a African Farm was rejected by at least five other British publishers before being recommended for publication to Chapman and Hall by its reader, the novelist George Meredith. While it is certainly clear that her publishers knew she was a woman before publishing her novel and that her real identity would likely become known to the general public, Schreiner retained the use of her pseudonym for many years, apparently in an attempt to have the novel read as other than exclusively authored by a young woman, and a colonial. It appears that Chapman and Hall, fearing that the novel’s treatment of illegitimacy might offend powerful and prudish book-sellers, may have tried in vain to have Schreiner revise it to have protagonist Lyndall marry her lover. Lyndall’s status as an unwed mother, and a freethinker, disgusted many socially conservative and religious reviewers, but is at the heart of Schreiner’s project. Through her, Schreiner articulates most of her proto-feminist arguments about the structure and effect of women’s social and economic dependency on men. Lyndall insists on being sent away for a proper education, and in her discussions with Em, Waldo, Gregory Rose, and her unnamed lover, she offers powerful indictments of processes which encourage the internalizing of psychologically damaging gender stereotypes -- including education. Society shapes women, “by the ends it sets before us,” she tells Waldo; to men it says “Work; and to us it says -- Seem!” (154).

Lyndall’s attitude toward marriage is perhaps her most striking position. Why, for example, does she accept Gregory Rose’s proposal, subject to certain conditions, but refuse the offer of marriage from the man she appears to love? Schreiner’s polemical and influential Woman and Labour engaged with a late-nineteenth-century eugenicist position that advocated that it was precisely because women bore the responsibility for ensuring physically and mentally strong offspring that they should be free to choose suitable partners, and enjoy the necessary social and economic independence to allow them to do so. Schreiner agreed that women should be free from these restraints, but suggested too that emphasizing the supremacy of women’s child-bearing abilities devalued them, and, should they choose this as their primary function, rendered them parasitic on society. She went further by linking this parasitism (a recurring theme in the volume) with the subjugation of others by society.

Woman and Labour represents Schreiner’s considered and mature view on the subject of marriage, but its argument also informs an understanding of Lyndall’s behavior in The Story of an African Farm. Having returned to the farm after her first connection with her Stranger, she determines to accept the proposal of marriage made by Gregory Rose, the farm’s new tenant farmer, not because she loves him (she doesn’t), but because it will at least give her the benefit of a married name without any of the drawbacks of subjection to a man who subscribes to the values of a patriarchal society. Gregory, after all, is not interested in possessing Lyndall in the “conventional” way; that he dresses in Em’s mother’s clothes, and later disguises himself as a nurse to tend the dying Lyndall, marks him as Schreiner’s brave prototype of a “New Man,” unwilling to be bound by gender stereotypes. Lyndall’s unnamed lover, by contrast, is interested in her only as a sexual possession. She realizes that marriage to him would be suffocating, and accuses him of deciding to pursue her to the farm merely because she seemed unattainable (205). She is, however, prepared to live with him for as long as they love each other -- but only outside of the Cape Colony, away from its restrictive social proprieties, which would condemn her as a fallen woman for being unmarried but sexually active.