Olive Schreiner Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background

Olive Emmeline Schreiner was born on March 24, 1855, at Wittebergen in the eastern Cape Colony, on the ragged edge between settler farms and Xhosa-speaking territories where imperial conquest and frontier hunger still shaped daily life. She was the ninth child of Gottlob Schreiner, a German missionary of the London Missionary Society, and Rebecca Lyndall, a Cape-born woman whose hard competence and moral force marked Schreiner for life. Olive grew up amid itinerant mission stations, drought, illness, and constant improvisation, absorbing the austerity and contradictions of Protestant piety set against colonial violence.

Her childhood was physically fragile and psychologically intense: long periods of solitude, voracious reading when books were scarce, and a sharp early perception that women were trained to serve a system that rewarded men with authority and adventure. The Schreiner household was affectionate but strained by poverty and the missionary economy; Olive watched her mother stretch resources and dignity, while her father pursued callings that did not reliably feed a large family. The frontier taught her that the private realm of family feeling was never separate from politics - land, race, labor, and gender were bound together in the same dust.

Education and Formative Influences

Schreiner had no stable formal schooling; her education was largely self-made, stitched from borrowed volumes, Bible study, and the discipline of observation. As a teenager she worked as a governess on remote farms, encountering the enclosed lives of colonial women and the brutalities that underwrote pastoral comfort. These years also brought intellectual rebellion: she read widely in science, freethought, and liberal theology, and the collision between inherited faith and empirical inquiry pushed her toward an ethical humanism that rejected easy consolation but kept a near-mystical seriousness about suffering and duty.

Career, Major Works, and Turning Points

In the late 1870s Schreiner drafted the novel that would make her name, publishing it in London in 1883 as The Story of an African Farm under the male pseudonym Ralph Iron. Its uncompromising depiction of a Karoo childhood, religious doubt, and a young womans hunger for intellectual and erotic autonomy startled Victorian readers; the book quickly became a touchstone for New Woman debates. She moved through Britain in the 1880s, mixing with radicals and reformers, and wrote essays that fused feminism with an attack on economic coercion, most famously Woman and Labour (1911). Returning repeatedly to South Africa, she became a fierce critic of Cecil Rhodes and imperial capitalism, condemning the Jameson Raid, grieving the devastations of the South African War (1899-1902), and later warning that the racial state being built in the Union of South Africa (1910) would corrupt both oppressor and oppressed.

Philosophy, Style, and Themes

Schreiners inner life was a battleground between longing and discipline. She distrusted the heat of polemic even while living in an age that demanded it, insisting that moral clarity required emotional patience: "No good work is ever done while the heart is hot and anxious and fretted". That sentence is less a platitude than a self-command from a writer who knew her own volatility - the depressive spells, the indignations, the tenderness that could tip into exhaustion. Her essays and letters return to the problem of how to act without being consumed by reaction, a stance that anticipates later feminist arguments about burnout and ethical attention.

Her style blends plainspoken realism with parable and symbol, as if the Karoo itself - wide, harsh, and luminous - forced metaphysical questions into the open. She wrote of love and sex not as genteel sentiment but as spiritual peril and revelation: "Perhaps the old monks were right when they tried to root love out; perhaps the poets are right when they try to water it. It is a blood-red flower, with the color of sin; but there is always the scent of a god about it". That doubleness runs through her fiction: desire is neither excuse nor disgrace but a test of freedom. And she had a frontier sense for the split between public comedy and private gravity, a technique that lets her puncture pomposity while preserving compassion: "Everything has two sides - the outside that is ridiculous, and the inside that is solemn". The remark describes her method - to show how colonial authority can look absurd in its costumes and rituals, yet remain deadly serious in its consequences.

Legacy and Influence

Schreiner died on December 11, 1920, in Wynberg, near Cape Town, after years of illness, and was later buried at Buffelskop near Cradock, her grave facing the open country that shaped her imagination. She endures as one of South Africas foundational modern writers and an international feminist thinker who linked the subjection of women to the economics of labor and empire, even when her own positions on race were formed within the limits and conflicts of her time. The Story of an African Farm remains a classic of colonial modernity - psychologically sharp, ethically restless, and stylistically daring - while her political writings stand as early warnings about the costs of racialized power and militarized nationalism. Her influence runs through later South African letters and through global feminist argument: not as a saint, but as a mind insisting that private feeling and public justice are the same problem, written in different registers.