Olive Schreiner

Daughter of a German missionary father and British mother, Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was born on the border of the Cape Colony in South Africa in 1855 where, apart from some time in London in the 1880s and the early twentieth century, she resided until she died in 1920. The cross-national nature of her parents' identities is indicative of her own later embroilment in the politics of nationality, identity, religion and race in Southern Africa, issues with which she grappled ferociously throughout her lifetime. She thought of herself as South African - as opposed to English, German or even Dutch (the Dutch Boers were a central part of her African experience and they are recurring concern of both her fiction and non-fictional writings) - at a time when tumultuous events, from brutal wars to swift economic industrialization, were contributing to the formation of the nation. 1889 photograph of Olive Schreiner [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons Schreiner lived through the horrors of both Anglo-Boer Wars to see the passing of the South Africa Act by the British Parliament in 1909, which led to the creation of the Union of South Africa....