Schreiner, Olive Emilie Albertina
Schreiner, Olive Emilie Albertina ( 1855 – 1920 ),born in Cape Colony, South Africa, the daughter of a missionary. She began to write while working as a governess, and when she came to England in 1881 had completed her best-known novel, The Story of an African Farm, published to much acclaim in 1883 under the pseudonym ‘Ralph Iron’. Set in the vividly evoked landscape of her childhood, it recounts the lives of two orphaned cousins, stay-at-home Em and unconventional Lyndall, greeted by feminists as one of the first ‘New Women’, who breaks away from her Bible-belt origins, becomes pregnant by a lover whom she refuses to marry, and dies after the death of her baby; also of Waldo, son of the farm's German overseer, whose rebellious spirit is aroused (as was Schreiner's) by reading H. Spencer 's First Principles. This novel won her the friendship of Havelock Ellis , and while in England she moved...
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