On successful martyrdom - Neal Ascherson in NYRB in 1980:

‘“The bulky parcel was sewn up in a piece of coarse cotton cloth to keep its pages together, and then in brown paper…. The manuscript was very indifferently written; many blots, many erasions were on almost every page, and here and there a grease mark as though the tallow candle, by which she probably wrote, had dropped a tear.” In this package from South Africa, still smelling of the woodsmoke of the Karoo back country, was the first version of The Story of an African Farm. It was 1880; Olive Schreiner, governess in a remote Afrikaner farm, was only twenty-five years old. She had written one of the most extraordinary novels of the century. To describe it as a Bildungsroman, the tale of a young girl’s search for truth and independence, is to evade its lonely originality. The Story of an African Farm is an orphan without close relations in literature and defies classification. Olive Schreiner herself never wrote anything else to compare with it in quality, during the remaining forty years of her life. Today she is remembered almost exclusively for African Farm, and First and Scott, though they will convince every reader of this biography that this is unfair, sadly concede in their final sentence that “perhaps she will always be discovered” through that early novel.’

(…)

‘From Man to Man, which she hoped would be her major novel, was tinkered with through most of her life but never completed: these biographers report that the manuscript is interesting but indigestible. Dreams, a collection of allegories written in a vague, luxuriant style, was something of a popular success before the war, especially with radically minded women, but, to judge by the extracts here, is hardly readable today. African Farm overshadows everything.’

(…)

‘She was not yet nine years old when she underwent a sort of conversion experience. Bewildered and miserable, the little girl sat on the veld and watched the sun rise. “And, as I looked at that almost intolerable beauty, a curious feeling came over me. It was not what I thought put into exact words, but I seemed to see a world in which creatures no more hated and crushed [one another], in which the strong helped the weak, and men forgave each other and did not try to crush others but to help. I did not think of it as something to be in a distant future; it was there, about me, and I was in it, a part of it.”’

(…)

‘Olive Schreiner was very much a late-Victorian with her belief in inevitable progress and the force of will power, and the vision—in itself one of those revelations of unio mystica which are given to a few in all ages—came in retrospect to be a message about cooperation, pacifism, socialism. The meaning she decided to extract from the vision was not mystical but in the end political.’

(…)

‘In 1881, Olive Schreiner arrived in Britain for what was to be a stay of eight years.
African Farm was published the following year, an immediate success both of scandal and esteem. Olive Schreiner entered the turbulent, iconoclastic world of the late-Victorian intellectuals. A new heaven and a new earth were eagerly being prepared; early socialism had all the millennial promise of the vision on the veld, offering not only the end of selfish capitalism and imperialism but a total revolution in human relations, including the relations between the sexes. The passionate feminism of her novels was now put to the test. But Olive, well known as she soon became in all these progressive groups, was by nature not a “joiner.” She contributed her ideas and her friendship, but was never committed to any one movement, party, or force.’

(…)

‘Olive’s difficulties about sex were intellectual as well as emotional. As a “free woman,” she wrote voluminously about sex, or rather about the “eternal and blissful union of two souls” in which a physical element was suggested rather than described. She either invented or co-invented that peculiar but immensely popular notion of “sexual intercourse as a sacrament,” something pure and great “to be partaken of between two souls, not only for the production of children, but sometimes going even further and consecrating the two who partake of it to a life…of the highest good and beauty.”’

(…)

‘She was a pre-Freudian, for whom the ego and conscious will were free agents, and physical passion their enemy.’

(…)
‘She died in 1920, and was buried on a hill overlooking the Karoo. Not long before, she had said that she was “only a broken and untried possibility.” Ruth First and Ann Scott sensibly retort: broken, perhaps, but hardly untried. African Farm, as the story of a girl who would follow her own chosen destiny at the cost of loneliness and even death, was a sort of program for Olive Schreiner’s life. “She made important claims for herself,” the biographers comment, “and in her struggles to reach them she savaged herself.” She never reconciled “her needs and her sense of self as a woman with those of her work as a writer.” The woman suffered, and so did the writing. But First and Scott would not, as some psychoanalysts might, write “failure” under this unresolved, unhappy life. These are evangelical biographers, and for them the life of Olive Schreiner is not a defeat but a successful martyrdom.’

Read the article here.

When is life a defeat? Fail again isn’t it, fail better.

The novelist should not be too much of an idealist, otherwise the work will suffer.

The longing for purity is understandable but self-defeating.