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Olive Schreiner, the daughter of Gottlob Schreiner and Rebecca Lyndall, was born in Basutoland, South Africa, on 24th March, 1855. Her parents were missionaries and the family lived in an isolated part of the Cape Colony.
In 1865 Schreiner was dismissed by the London Missionary Society when it discovered that he had been engaged in trading activities. The family experienced a long period of poverty. Attempts by Schreiner to start his own business ended in failure and he died a broken man in 1876.
Olive found work as a governess and then taught at the Kimberley New School. In her free time she began work on a novel about her experiences in South Africa. When Olive had saved enough money she travelled to Britain with the objective of becoming a doctor. While working at the Royal Infirmary in Edinburgh Olive heard about the Women's Medical School that had been established by Elizabeth Garrett Anderson and Sophia Jex-Blake. Olive moved to London where she began attending lectures at the Medical School. Olive also began going to socialist meetings and during this time became friends with leading radicals such as Edward Carpenter, Eleanor Marx and Bruce Glasier.
Schreiner was introduced to George Meredith who worked for the publishers, Chapman & Hall. She showed him the novel she had written on life in South Africa. He was very impressed and the Story of an African Farm was published in 1883. The novel tells the story of Lyndall, a woman living on an isolated ostrich farm. The book was praised by feminists who approved of the strong heroine who controls her own destiny. Acclaimed by the critics, the Story of an African Farm sold well in both Britain and America. W.T. Stead, the editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, claimed that Schreiner was "the only woman of genius South Africa has ever produced".
Soon after the novel was published Schreiner developed an intimate relationship with the writer, Havelock Ellis. They both shared the same views on sexuality, free love, marriage, the emancipation of women, sexual equality and birth control. Although they often lived apart, they wrote letters to each other for the next thirty-six years.
Schreiner followed Story of an African Farm with two collections of short stories, Dreams (1891) and Dream Life and Real Life (1893) but the two novels she was working on at the time, From Man to Man and Undine, were not published until after her death.
In 1894 Schreiner returned to South Africa where she married Samuel Cronwright. Her only child, died sixteen hours after being born. Schreiner continued to write and her next book, Trooper Peter Halkett of Mashonaland (1897) was a strong attack on Imperialism and British racism in South Africa. However, as a pacifist, Schreiner was unwilling to give her full support to the armed rising that led to the Boer War in 1899.
Women and Labour was published in 1911. Although Schreiner was disappointed with the book, it was immediately acclaimed as an important statement on feminism and had a major influence on a large number of young women. A strong supporter of universal suffrage, Schreiner argued that the vote was "a weapon, by which the weak may be able to defend themselves against the strong, the poor against the weak".
On the outbreak of the First World War Schreiner moved back to Britain. Over the next four years she was active in the peace movement and worked closely with organizations such as the Union of Democratic Control and the Non-Conscription Fellowship.
In August 1920 Olive Schreiner returned to South Africa. Four months later she died suddenly on 10th December, 1920. She was buried without religious ceremony next to her daughter at Buffels Kop, overlooking the Karoo Desert.
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(1) Olive Schreiner, letter to Emily Hobhouse (October, 1914)
Again and again when I tried to get rooms they wouldn't let me have them on account of my name. I found very nice cheap rooms in Chelsea. There was a sweet refined looking little lady who let them; I told her I would take them. When I told her my name she turned and glared at me. I enquired what was the matter. She asked me if my name was not German. I said it was, but I was a British subject born in South Africa, that my husband was a British subject of pure British descent, and my mother was English, that my father who left Germany 80 years ago, was a naturalized British subject, and had been dead nearly 50 years.
She turned round and stormed at me, all her seemingly gentle face contorted with rage and hate. She said that if my ancestors came from Germany "three hundred years ago" it would make no difference, no one with a German name should come into her house, and poured forth a stream of abuse that was almost inconceivable.
Oh Emily the worst of war is not the death on the battlefields; it is the meanness, the cowardice, the hatred it awakens. Where is the free England of our dreams, in which every British subject, whether Dutch, English, French or German in extraction, had an equal right and freedom?
(2) Olive Schreiner, letter to Adela Smith (18th June, 1915)
It is the thought of all these beautiful young lives cut down before they have even tasted of the cup of life that wrings my heart so. I have never met a human creature who hates war as I hate it. I can only fix my eyes on that far off time over thousands of years, when humanity will realise that all men are brothers; that it is finer to bring one noble human being into the world and rear it well for the broadest human ends, than to kill ten thousand. It's because of men like Paul Methuen and my nephew Oliver do and might mean so much to the world that I feel the risk of losing them so much, and I can't bear to think they're killing anyone.
(3) Olive Schreiner, speech on behalf of the Union of Democratic Control (11th March, 1916)
Our Union of Democratic Control has two objects. The one is to draw together into an organised body those English men and women of whom, as in every other country engaged in this war, there are many hundreds of thousands, who have not desired war, and who are determined that when the peace comes it shall be a reality, and not a hotbed for the raising of future wars. We feel that the Governments have made the wars - the peoples themselves must make the peace! We are organizing ourselves, that, when the time comes, we may be able effectively to act. Our second aim is to educate ourselves and others to this end.
(4) Olive Schreiner, an open letter to conscientious objectors that was published in the Labour Leader (16th March, 1916)
At a time when the beloved youth and the splendid manhood of all our nations, Turkish and English, Russian and Bulgarian, German and French, are pouring forth their life's blood for some Ruler, some Flag, some State, some thing which seems to them the highest good, shall we who believe that the beacon light which burns before us is the brightest and largest the soul of man has known - a light which is destined to shed itself over the whole earth till the petty competitions and hatreds and antagonisms of races and States are melted in its brightness. You are standing for the religion of the future.
(5) Olive Schreiner, letter to Adela Smith (December, 1916)
I met a woman the other day whom I'd not seen for a long time and the first thing she said to me was, "Aren't you glad to hear that the Kaiser's got cancer?" Now what could I say? I've had much too much physical suffering to rejoice in the suffering of any sentient creature; if a lion had torn my arm off I wouldn't want it to have cancer. There would be its physical suffering added to my physical suffering, to make the terrible sum total of suffering bigger! I think I can understand most things in human nature, but delight in human suffering (or animal) I cannot understand.
(6) Olive Schreiner, speech to meeting in commemoration of John Stuart Mill (July, 1918)
We are meeting today to commemorate a man whom I believe to be the noblest of those whom the English-speaking race has produced in the last hundred years. John Stuart Mill laboured for the freedom of women. But he did more. He laboured for human freedom. Women can best show their gratitude to him by studying his writings.
Many women have now the vote, and are part of the governing power of their nation - all will have it soon. If we wish to use our power to its noblest end, we shall have to learn the lesson Mill taught - that the freedom of all human creatures are essential to the full development of human life on earth. We shall have to labour, not merely for a larger freedom for ourselves, but for every subject race and class, and for all suppressed individuals. To do this is to lay th
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