Both the “Times and Seasons” chapter and the Stranger’s allegory of the hunter (which became one of the most excerpted and anthologized sections of the novel in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-centuries) share with Schreiner’s other published dream allegories an earnestness which may strike the modern reader as unduly ponderous. But it is important to view them, along with Lyndall’s expostulations about women’s rights, and the inconclusiveness of the narrative as a whole, as part of Schreiner’s conscious attempt at a new kind of writing. The Story of an African Farm is concerned, throughout, with modes of narration, with storytelling, reading, and visual or aural representation, and each of the children is associated with a different kind of storytelling, as they accept or deconstruct the narrative order of the adult world, or strive to write their own lives. Schreiner’s novel itself explores the value or otherwise of numerous narrative modes, drawing on several generic conventions -- including those associated with the sermon, allegory, the polemical essay, dream narrative, and the memoir -- in order to reinvent them, weaving a structure which is open-ended, and subverts any desire for closure. In her striking preface to the second edition of the novel, Schreiner argued that human life could be “painted according to two methods”: the predictable “stage method,” in which characters appear and duly act their expected parts, or “the method of the life we all lead,” in which “nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away” (xxxix). This dedication to portraying the seeming confusion of everyday life, as well as to suggest characters’ psychological processes as vividly as possible, makes Schreiner almost anachronistically modern -- she was writing, remember, before Freud, and before the relatively widespread experimentalism which has in retrospect been labeled “modernism.”

A history of the contexts and reception of Schreiner’s most famous novel should not only pay attention to details of the author’s life and historical and intellectual contexts, but also to the history of the novel’s packaging and contextualization for different audiences, at different historical moments. For more than a century, it has been promoted variously as groundbreaking New Woman fiction, a manifesto for agnosticism or even atheism, an insightful analysis of the intellectual development of children, and as the first important novel in English from Southern Africa. This Barnes and Noble edition becomes another instance of the novel’s repackaging and contextualization. Early twenty-first-century North American readers are likely to be struck differently by, or by different themes, motifs, and concerns than those which either enthused or reviled late-Victorian readers. Like its first readers, however, today’s readers are unlikely to remain unmoved.

Andrew van der Vlies is Lecturer in Anglophone Post-Colonial Literature and Theory in the Department of English Literature at the University of Sheffield, England, and a graduate of Rhodes University in South Africa, and the University of Oxford, where he completed his doctorate in 2004. He has published articles on several South African writers, including Olive Schreiner, Roy Campbell, and Alan Paton, and researches colonial and post-colonial textual, publishing, and reading cultures.