Olive Schreiner

Lyndall, Schreiner's articulate young feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. Raised as an orphan amid a makeshift family, she witnesses an intolerable world of colonial exploitation. Desiring a formal education, she leaves the isolated farm for boarding school in her early teens, only to return four years later from an unhappy relationship. Unable to meet the demands of her mysterious lover, Lyndall retires to a house in Bloemfontein, where, delirious with exhaustion, she is unknowingly tended by an English farmer disguised as her female nurse. This is the devoted Gregory Rose, Schreiner's daring embodiment of the sensitive New Man. A cause célèbre when it appeared in London, The Story of an African Farm transformed the shape and course of the late-Victorian novel. From the haunting plains of South Africa's high Karoo, Schreiner boldly addresses her society's greatest fears - the loss of faith, the dissolution of marriage, and women's social and political independence. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This volume brings together for the first time the entire range of the shorter pieces of imaginative writing that she continued to produce throughout her life, together with her final account of the vision informing her life's work. It rescues Schreiner from the charge of having exhausted a slim talent in one semi autobiographical novel and provides a context in which to situate a woman writer whose idealist concerns recognised no simple geographical boundaries. To picture her as first and foremost a colonial writer or, alternatively, primarily as a member of the finde-siecle British avant garde, does little justice to the links she made in her own writing and to the complex situation she occupied, for Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner's life (1855-1920) straddled two centuries and two continents, while her travels between the land of her birth, South Africa, and her family's European homeland embroiled her in the political ferment of two wars: the Boer War (1899-1902) and the first World War (1914-1918).