Olive Schreiner

-
Standard Name: Schreiner, Olive
Birth Name: Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner
Pseudonym: Ralph Iron
OS was a political and social activist as well as a writer. Her biographer Liz Stanley says she was internationally probably the best-known feminist writer and theorist from the 1880s through to the 1930s.
Stanley, Liz. “Encountering the Imperial and Colonial Past through Olive Schreiner’s <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland</span&gt”;. Women’s Writing, Vol.
7
, No. 2, pp. 197-19.
198
Much of her writing strongly advocates a more democratic, just, free society, using to do so the art of allegory and the parable. Her early novels were followed by a large number of political essays. Later, she published the feminist testament which made her an icon in the women's movement in the early decades of the twentieth century. She carried on a voluminous correspondence with many family members and friends, the latter including Havelock Ellis , Edward Carpenter , and Karl Pearson . Several volumes of these have been published posthumously, as were two early novels which she deemed unpublishable during her lifetime.
Black and white photograph of Olive Schreiner, seated, with one elbow on a desk and her head resting on that hand. She is wearing a white dress that falls loosely from her shoulders, gathered at the wrists and with ruffles at the throat. Her hair is pinned back with short curls in front.
Black and white photo of Olive Schreiner, head and shoulders only. She looks straight at the camera, her hair short around her face and her neckline high, with ruffles.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Michelene Wandor
MW writes here about travel, office parties, poetry readings, Olive Schreiner . Many of her poems are personal (including several on her sons and on her mother's death). The political is implicitly present: in untitled...
Textual Production Michelene Wandor
Nonetheless, several of her plays have never (in 2008) been staged. One is Wild Diamonds, set in South Africa and seen through the eyes of Olive Schreiner and Cecil Rhodes, which was commissioned...
Textual Production Elspeth Huxley
EH thought a perfect precept for biography was voiced by Shakespeare 's Othello: nothing extenuate, nor set down ought in malice.
Nicholls, C. S. Elspeth Huxley. HarperCollins.
427
After publishing a life (that of Hugh, third Baron Delamere ) as her...
Textual Production Mona Caird
Scholar Ann Heilmann points out that this article significantly predated a series of commentaries of similar cast by Charlotte Perkins Gilman , Cicely Hamilton , Olive Schreiner , and Elizabeth Robins , which emerged over...
Textual Production Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence
EPL published at least eight suffragist pamphlets from 1907 to 1915. In one of these, A Call to Women (undated), published by the National Women's Social and Political Union , she quotes from a letter...
Textual Features Phyllis Bentley
Influenced by Olive Schreiner 's Dreams, 1890, the collection consisted of four stories allegorically treating the themes of religion, class, sex, and daydreams.
Bentley, Phyllis. "O Dreams, O Destinations". Gollancz.
102, 126
Johnson, George M., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 191. Gale Research.
23
Textual Features Doris Lessing
This includes autobiographical, African, and critical essays (on the work of herself and others, notably an Afterword written for a 1968 edition of Olive Schreiner 's Story of an African Farm).
Maslen, Elizabeth. Doris Lessing. Northcote House.
64-5
Residence Constance Lytton
Only a few months before she died CL , still partly paralysed, made another attempt at independent life, moving from her mother's house at Knebworth to a flat in Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, central...
Reception Mona Caird
Where literary historian John Sutherland has called MCone of the most aggressive of the New Woman novelists,
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Ann Heilmann (who has led the scholarly rediscovery of the story of Caird's life) has argued that...
Reception Amy Levy
A revival began with Melvyn New 's edition in 1993 of her Complete Novels and Selected Writings.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press.
2
Although AL 's poetry is comparatively slighted in this edition, her work has been regularly included...
Publishing Vernon Lee
VL 's political stance was seen as dangerously unpatriotic: only a few of her essays were published by the Labour Leader, Nation, and New Statesman. In letter to Havelock Ellis in September...
politics Hannah Lynch
Barine lived as a New Woman in her independence and her intellectual productivity, but her style was self-consciously feminine, and she deplored the left-wing feminism of writers like Olive Schreiner and George Egerton , whom...
politics Isabella Ormston Ford
She was also a member of the London-based Writers' Club , the Women's Institute —which embraced an educational programme of appalling size, to the frivolous mind—and the Pioneer Club , which counted IOF ,...
politics Vernon Lee
VL was a passionate pacifist and anti-fascist. She contributed generously to any appeal made to advance international understanding, the cause of peace, or social progress.
Gunn, Peter. Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856-1935. Oxford University Press.
199
She wrote anti-war articles for newspapers (Olive Schreiner
politics Margaret Haig, Viscountess Rhondda
That autumn, against the wishes of both her father and her husband, she joined the WSPU , organising a local branch at Newport, South Wales. She paid her one-shilling annual membership fee and pledged...

Timeline

2 May 1857: A grand dome designed by Panizzi was opened...

Building item

2 May 1857

A grand dome designed by Panizzi was opened in what had been the central courtyard of the British Museum .

July 1889: Women's Suffrage: A Reply appeared in the...

Building item

July 1889

Women's Suffrage: A Reply appeared in the Fortnightly Review to counter Mary Augusta Ward 's Appeal Against Female Suffrage in the previous month's Nineteenth Century.

1895: Thomas Bird Mosher of Portland, Maine, began...

Writing climate item

1895

Thomas Bird Mosher of Portland, Maine, began publishing The Bibelot. A Reprint of Poetry & Prose for Book Lovers, a monthly series later collected as an annual volume, of exquisitely produced editions in tiny press-runs.

June 1908: The Women Writers' Suffrage League was established...

National or international item

June 1908

The Women Writers' Suffrage League was established by Cicely Hamilton and Bessie Hatton .

Texts

Schreiner, Olive. An English-South African’s View of the Situation: Words in Season. Hodder and Stoughton, 1899.
Schreiner, Olive. Dream Life and Real Life: A Little African Story. T. Fisher Unwin, 1893.
Schreiner, Olive. Dreams. T. Fisher Unwin, 1890.
Cronwright-Schreiner, S. C., and Olive Schreiner. “Foreword”. Thoughts on South Africa, Frederick A. Stokes, 1923, pp. 7-8.
Schreiner, Olive. From Man to Man; or Perhaps Only . . . T. Fisher Unwin, 1926.
Showalter, Elaine, and Olive Schreiner. “Introduction”. The Story of an African Farm, Bantam, 1993, p. vii - xxi.
Schreiner, Olive. “Preface”. The Letters of Olive Schreiner, 1876-1920, edited by S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner, Hyperion Press, 1976, p. v - viii.
Schreiner, Olive. “Preface”. Olive Schreiner Letters: Volume 1: 1871-1899, edited by Richard Rive, Oxford University Press, 1988, p. vii - ix.
Schreiner, Olive. The Letters of Olive Schreiner, 1876-1920. Editor Cronwright-Schreiner, S. C., T. Fisher Unwin, 1924.
Schreiner, Olive, and S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner. The Political Situation. T. Fisher Unwin, 1896.
Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm. Chapman and Hall, 1883.
Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm. Bantam, 1993.
Schreiner, Olive. Thoughts on South Africa. T. Fisher Unwin, 1923.
Schreiner, Olive. Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland. T. Fisher Unwin, 1897.
Schreiner, Olive. Undine. Harper and Brothers, 1928.
Schreiner, Olive. Woman and Labour. T. Fisher Unwin, 1911.