Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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 Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland”. Women’s Writing, 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.
"Olive Schreiner, half-length" Retrieved from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Picture_of_Olive_Schreiner.jpg.This work is licensed under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication license. This work is in the public domain.
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CL
died at the bed-sittingroom she had just moved into in London (once the lodging of Olive Schreiner
) at the early age of fifty-three.
Lytton, Constance. Letters of Constance Lytton. Elizabeth Edith, Countess of Balfour,Editor , Heinemann, 1925.
264
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray, Brian Harrison, and Lawrence Goldman, editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Education
Katharine Bruce Glasier
While enrolled at Newnham, Conway was inspired—both by her teacher Helen Gladstone
(daughter of the prime minister) and visiting speaker Olive Schreiner
—to adopt strong, militantly feminist views. Schreiner, she later wrote, encouraged every bit...
Education
L. M. Montgomery
When her savings ran out, she left university and by the next year she was teaching again in Belmont, P.E.I. Among the influential books she read in the next few years were Olive Schreiner
's...
Education
Doris Lessing
Before attending school and after she left, Doris educated herself by reading. Her parents possessed copies of the classics, like Scott
, Dickens
, and Kipling
. She read widely in the nineteenth century—her favourites...
Family and Intimate relationships
Gillian Slovo
Five hundred people were detained under this law in its first six months. On release they could be re-arrested (as First was as she stood in a phone booth outside the prison, about to tell...
Family and Intimate relationships
Tillie Olsen
Abe had named his new, post-Tillie baby after one of her literary heroes, Olive Schreiner
. TO
later tried to erase him from her life, expunging traces of him from the record and blacking out...
Friends, Associates
Katharine Bruce Glasier
Her involvement in socialist circles led her to acquaintance with Sidney
and Beatrice Webb
, Edward Hulton
(editor of the Sunday Chronicle), and Robert Blatchford
, for whom she wrote several articles.
Thompson, Laurence. The Enthusiasts. Victor Gollancz Limited, 1971.
One of her travelling companions (and a close friend) was the New Woman novelist Mona Caird
(famous for her declaration calling the institution of marriage a vexatious failure in the Westminster Review in 1888).
Thesing, William B., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 199. Gale Research, 1999.
EFB
met Olive Schreiner
either through the Fellowship of the New Life
or the Men and Women's Club
, where both were associates. Schreiner read but remained noncommittal about EFB
's unpublished paper, The Woman...
While in South Africa, the Pethick-Lawrences met many prominent political figures, including W. P. Schreiner
, who had been Prime Minister of the Cape in 1898. Emmeline became a good friend of the well-known feminist...
She saw a good deal of Olive Schreiner
, who called her the most interesting girl she had met in England,
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press, 2000.
179
and also took her on two trips outside London at the very end...
Timeline
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 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 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.