Stories, Dreams and Allegories

Olive Schreiner (Ralph Iron Olive) was born in Wittebergen, Cape Colony, South Africa, on March 25, 1855.She was a writer who published the first great South African novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883). She had strong insight, aggressive feminist and liberal perspectives on politics and society, and an extraordinary spirit that was damaged by asthma and depression. Schreiner had no proper education, even though she used to read widely and was taught by her mother. From 1874 until 1881, when she went to England, expecting to study medicine, she wrote two semiautobiographical books, Undine (published in 1928) and The Story of an African Farm (1883), and started From Man to Man (1926), for which she worked alternately for 40 years but never finished.