Olive Schreiner Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Early Life and Background
Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner (1855, 1920) was a South African novelist, essayist, and social critic whose work helped to define early feminist thought and modern South African literature in English. Born on 24 March 1855 at a mission station in the Cape Colony, she was one of many children in a family closely connected to missionary work and rural life. A largely self-educated prodigy, she read voraciously while working as a governess across the Karoo. The physical vastness and moral complexities of colonial society that she observed in these years became enduring subjects in her fiction and allegories. Among her siblings, the lawyer and statesman William Philip (W. P.) Schreiner would become a significant political figure in the Cape Colony; his career and principles often intersected with her own reformist commitments.

Formative Years in Britain and First Success
In the early 1880s Schreiner traveled to Britain, seeking both medical training and a larger intellectual world than the colonial margins could offer. Chronic ill health curtailed any sustained study, but London provided what she most needed: a circle of radical and scientific thinkers engaged with questions of sex, labor, and empire. She formed lasting friendships with Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter, both important for their advocacy of social and sexual reform. In 1883 she published The Story of an African Farm in London under the pseudonym Ralph Iron. The novel startled Victorian readers with its philosophical candor, religious skepticism, and unsentimental portrayal of life on a remote farm. Its character Lyndall articulated a distinctly modern feminist voice, challenging the constraints placed upon women in marriage, work, and thought. The book is widely regarded as the first major South African novel in English.

Return to South Africa and Expanding Vision
Schreiner returned to South Africa with a sharpened sense of purpose, dividing her energies between literature and public questions. Dreams (1890), a collection of allegories, condensed her ethical and political concerns into powerful symbolic narratives. In 1894 she married the farmer and political organizer Samuel Cronwright, who later adopted the combined surname Cronwright-Schreiner. The couple moved often within the Cape interior as she sought climates that alleviated her asthma. They suffered the tragedy of losing their only child in infancy, a sorrow that deepened Schreiner's empathy for the precarities of ordinary life and that reverberated through her later writings.

Imperial Critique and the Rhodes Question
The intensification of British imperialism in southern Africa drew Schreiner into direct political controversy. She opposed the expansionist policies associated with Cecil Rhodes and the British South Africa Company, and in Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897) she imagined a stark moral reckoning with the violence and profiteering of conquest. This critique made her a prominent, polarizing voice in debates about the ethical foundations of empire.

War, Civil Liberties, and Humanitarian Alliances
During the South African War (1899, 1902), Schreiner published An English South African's View of the Situation (1899), a forceful plea for justice, moderation, and the protection of civilians. She denounced the concentration camps in which Boer women and children suffered and died, and she stood in solidarity with the humanitarian campaign led by Emily Hobhouse to expose conditions and reduce mortality. Her outspokenness brought censorship, searches, and forced relocations under martial law. Throughout these ordeals she found support in conversations with her brother W. P. Schreiner, then a leading Cape statesman, and in a transnational network of correspondents who shared her distrust of militarism and racial domination.

Feminism, Labor, and the Ethics of Freedom
After the war Schreiner again spent periods in Britain, where she wrote Women and Labour (1911), a landmark text that argued for women's economic independence and for the social reorganization necessary to realize genuine equality. The book advanced a theory of cooperative human productivity that repudiated both the parasitism imposed upon women and the moral distortions of militarized economies. Her friendships with Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter continued to shape the reception of her ideas among reformers, suffragists, and socialists who were rethinking marriage, sexuality, and work.

Race, Citizenship, and the Future of South Africa
Schreiner consistently argued that any durable political settlement in South Africa had to include justice across racial lines. In pamphlets and essays, including Closer Union (1909), she warned that constitutional arrangements excluding African and Coloured citizens would corrupt public life and entrench violence. Thoughts on South Africa, published posthumously in 1923, collected earlier writings that combined sociological observation with prophetic critique. Her unfinished long novel From Man to Man; or Perhaps Only, posthumously published in 1926, extended her exploration of gender, sexuality, and race within the intimate sphere, showing how private inequities mirrored larger structures of domination.

War, Exile of Health, and Final Years
The outbreak of the First World War confirmed Schreiner's skepticism of militarism. Ill health kept her from sustained public campaigning, but she wrote and corresponded steadily, maintaining a principled stance for peace and democratic reform. She spent much of the war in Britain, close to allies and to family members, before returning to South Africa in 1920. She died in Wynberg, near Cape Town, on 11 December 1920. Samuel Cronwright-Schreiner served as her literary executor, editing and publishing her letters and unfinished manuscripts, thereby preserving a record of one of the most distinctive moral and literary voices of her era.

Legacy
Olive Schreiner's influence reaches across literature, feminism, and political thought. The Story of an African Farm opened a space for South African writing in English that was formally adventurous and intellectually fearless. Women and Labour became a touchstone for debates about work, domesticity, and citizenship. Her engagement with figures such as Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter connected southern African experiences to broader currents of international reform. In opposing Cecil Rhodes and confronting the cruelties of war alongside campaigners like Emily Hobhouse, she fused artistic expression with civic courage. Her work remains a testament to the conviction that personal freedom, gender equality, and racial justice are indivisible, and that literature can be both a mode of truth-telling and a means of social transformation.

Our collection contains 10 quotes who is written by Olive, under the main topics: Wisdom - Love - Writing - Mother - Deep.

• 1926 From Man to Man or Perhaps Only... (Novel)
• 1911 Woman and Labour (Non-fiction)
• 1890 Dreams (Collection)
• 1883 The Story of an African Farm (Novel)