The Story of an African Farm

Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) was born in a remote Cape Colony mission station, one of twelve children of an English missionary father and German mother, and left home at fifteen after the family's finances collapsed, working as a governess on isolated South African farms for most of the following decade — the setting she drew on for The Story of an African Farm, written during these years and published in London in 1883 under the male pseudonym "Ralph Iron" once she judged, correctly, that a woman's name would count against it. Its frank treatment of religious doubt, colonial isolation, and a young woman's demand for independence made it a sensation and a foundational text of English-language feminist fiction. She spent the following decade in England among socialist and early-feminist circles before returning to South Africa, where she became an outspoken critic of British imperialism and the Boer War, and a campaigner for both women's suffrage and racial justice within the emerging South African state, marrying Samuel Cronwright, who took her surname, in 1894. She died in Cape Town at sixty-five.