Olive Schreiner's Fiction: Landscape and Power Book

Olive Schreiner is one of those women writers--such as Germaine de Stael, George Sand, or Margaret Fuller--who has been more famous for her life, circle of friends, and protofeminism than for her writings. These women are all known about but relatively unknown when it comes to a close study of their fiction. With Olive Schreiner's Fiction, Gerald Monsman has partially rectified that situation.

Schreiner embodies and unusual combination of feminism and colonial Victorianism. The daughter of missionary parents in South Africa, she noticed early in her life that the Gospel's social message was not consistent with the behavior or cultural activity of the colonists and empire builders by whom she was surrounded. She saw quite clearly the ways in which her society used religion to justify cultural domination and exploitation of both people and land and the ways in which appeals to a higher cause rationalized outright greed.