http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/17680249

Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) is internationally recognized as the first novelist of major importance to emerge from colonial South Africa. A pioneering feminist whose liberal social ideals played a critical role in the political and artistic movements of her time, Schreiner struggled throughout her life against the confining role allotted to Victorian women, especially those in the colonies. Schreiner's life is central to her texts. In this study Cherry Clayton explores Schreiner's fiction and nonfiction as "complementary aspects of the same developing mind and art." Without reducing Schreiner's literature to the purely autobiographical, Clayton suggests that Schreiner's fictional accounts of spiritual and social unconventionality are profoundly tied to the author's experiences as a young woman. Schreiner's troubled relationship with her distant and sometimes severe mother, according to Clayton, led to an ambivalence about women that is expressed in her female characters.

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