Woman And Labour [ By: Olive Schreiner ]

In 1881 Schreiner traveled with her savings to England to seek a publisher for her three manuscripts. Eventually The Story of an African Farm was accepted for Chapman & Hall by the novelist and poet George Meredith (1828-1909). The first edition was published under the pseudonym of Ralph Iron. Its feminist standpoint provoked much controversy, but the pioneering work is generally known as South Africa's first novel. Schreiner set the story against the barren landscape of the Great Karoo. The central characters include two orphaned cousins, the kind and adaptable Em and the independent Lyndall, who was greeted by feminists as one of the first 'New Women'. They live on a farm under the care of Em's stepmother. Lyndall falls in love with the rebellious Waldo, the son of the German farm manager. (Waldo was named after Ralph Waldo Emerson and Lyndall after Schreiner's mother.) Lyndall dies in childbirth, refusing to marry her lover, who wants a more submissive woman. In her last moments she is visited by a man called Gregory Rose, an aesthete from England dressed as a woman. Waldo is faithful to his art, and he rejects orthodox Christian belief. He dies nearly unobtrusively in the closing pages, watching tiny, yellow chickens. "Ah, to live on so, year after year, how well! Always in the present; letting each day glide, bringing its own labour, and its own beauty; the gradual lighting up of the hills, night and the stars, firelight and the coals!" In the second edition Schreiner added a preface in which she defended her work - it was criticized for its structure, and its apparently arbitrary plot. Schreiner argued that it reflected her method - "the method of the life we all lead. Here nothing can be prophesied. There is a strange coming and going of feet. Men appear, act and re-act upon each other, and pass away. When the crisis comes the man who would fit it does not return. When the curtain falls no one is ready."