On Schreiner – Lyndall Gordon in LRB in 1980:

“It is astonishing that since Olive Schreiner died in 1920 there have been six biographies. Why should the life of a woman writing from remote farms and railway stoppings in South Africa between the 1870s and the First World War attract this attention? The new Olive Schreiner has been commissioned with the renewed interest in the feminist heroine of The Story of an African Farm (1883), and this approach to Olive Schreiner, which places her as a polemicist rather than a novelist, may be the most durable basis for her fame.
In one of her letters Schreiner predicted that potential biographers would never understand her horror of falsity.”

(…)

“Olive Schreiner was born in 1855 at Wittebergen, her parents’ mission station on what was then the Cape border. Her first two novels were completed in her early twenties while she earned her living as a governess on farms in the Cradock region of the Eastern Cape. She wrote Undine in a lean-to room which leaked so badly that she sometimes sat under an umbrella – hardly the cure for her crippling asthma. In 1880 she was revising the manuscript of the African Farm each morning before dawn, wretchedly unsure of herself – she once felt like throwing it in the farm dam – but when she took the book to London soon afterwards, it had a wide success and the young author was swept up in freethinking, socialist and Utopian circles.”

(…)

“All her words were designed to convert: Englishmen in their relation to Boers, men towards women, women towards prostitutes. She had the vehemence of a long line of Nonconformist preachers behind her, as well as great powers of sympathy. But her force came mainly, I think, from a rare indivisibility of mind and action. She spoke for causes when they were unpopular: for disfranchised blacks in 1908, when white groups were combining to frame the segregationalist constitution of South Africa. She refused to exclude black women from the Women’s Enfranchisement League, with some surprise that English suffragettes should be as indifferent as their colonial counterparts.”

(…)

“Her feminism was linked with an outspoken pacifism: she hoped that, in time, women would outlaw war because women ‘know the cost of flesh’, because ‘men’s bodies are our women’s works of art.’ Her feminism is expressed more compellingly, to my mind, in the lesser-known Dreams (1890) than in the African Farm. Her visionary mind and Biblical cadences were better suited to brief parables than long novels. Her brilliant parable of emancipation, ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’, was read aloud by suffragettes in Holloway prison. Constance Lytton said that it seemed not at all figurative: it was more ‘like an ABC railway guide to our journey’.”

(…)

“Olive Schreiner’s declaration that an independent, passionate, intelligent and virtuous woman could not easily expect to find an appropriate mate is not ‘neurotic’: it is common sense. She reminds me of Isabel Archer turning down the eligible Lord Warburton, when, in 1886, she refused Donkin with the words: ‘I must be free, you know, I must be free.’”

(…)

“The Puritans who migrated to America at the same time had to stretch their fancy to identify New England with the landscape of Exodus, but the South African interior was receptive to a very literal re-enactment of religious dreams. With all this there was an affinity in Olive Schreiner.”

(…)

“This biography, which is best at straight-forward political and historical narrative, gives an interesting account of Schreiner’s public advocacy of the Boer cause between 1891 and 1900. She described Boer psychology in terms of a 17th-century Calvinism which, encysted in the Taal (as their dialect was known before it established itself as Afrikaans), remained unaffected by the 18th century’s awakening to reason, tolerance and fraternity. But if their linguistic isolation cut them off from enlightenment, it also left them untouched by the degradations of commerce.”

(…)

“The Letters of Olive Schreiner is perhaps her best work; it is also a marvellous biographic source, for, during the productive periods of her life, she lived in remote places and depended on letters to explain herself and her setting to a large number of friends. She had the knack of intimacy, and reveals herself with dazzling directness and warmth.”

Read the article here.
For all independent, passionate, intelligent and virtuous creatures it’s not easy to find a mate. I’m not sure how the dolphins do it. Perhaps they complain also.

De Boers, no enlightenment, but also nu curses of commerce. Poverty and darkness, that’s seems to be the true Calvinistic spirit.

And South Africa as the true promised country, the landscape of Exodus can be found in the Karoo.

Zion is not in Utah, nor in Jerusalem but north of Cape Town.

We should have known this earlier.