- Olive Schreiner (1855-1920). South African novelist and social theorist. Largely overlooked today, Schreiner was one of the best-known writers in English from the 1880s to the 1920s. Born to English and German missionary parents, she personified rebellion against Victorianism at the height of the Victorian age. She was a passionate pacifist, feminist, and critic of organized religion (although very religious). Her novel, The Story of an African Farm, about a defiant unwed mother, the first specifically feminist work in English fiction, stunned the reading public in 1881. She was both pro-Boer and a supporter of rights for Black Africans; and was militantly opposed to Cecil Rhodes. While imprisoned by the English during the Boer war, she wrote Woman and Labor, a major nonfiction socio-economic treatise. She married S.C. Cronwright in her late thirties, and they shared the surname of “Cronwright-Schreiner.” Hampered by money troubles and asthma all her life, Olive retained a vibrant personality even in her last years. Contemporary accounts use the word “genius” more than any other in describing her. And a poor Lancashire working woman who had read African Farm said: “I think there is hundreds of women what feels like that but can't speak it, but she could speak what we feel.”
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