Author: Olive Schreiner

Schreiner published The Story of an African Farm in 1883 under the name Ralph Iron, having written it while working as a governess on Karoo farms, and it did something no English novel had done, which was to put the South African veld and a woman refusing marriage in the same book. Woman and Labour, in 1911, was treated as a founding text by the British suffrage movement. Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland is an attack on Cecil Rhodes and the chartered company's conduct in Rhodesia, and she had it published with a photograph of Black men put to death from a tree as its frontispiece. She opposed the war against the Boer republics, and she resigned from the Women's Enfranchisement League when it settled for a franchise restricted to white women. Asthma moved her around the country for most of her life. She died in 1920.