I am currently discarding many things that belong to me, having just gone through the process of having to dispose of things that belonged to someone else. Before I put this book review in the bin, I will recycle it here. I did it almost 40 years ago for reasons I will attempt to explain below. The review is not too bad, but more importantly the subject, Olive Schreiner, is very interesting. I can't say that I remember her all that well, proving that my long term memory is as bad as my short term one. In refreshing it I learned again what an intriguing character she was. In doing so I found a website containing her letters which should serve as a model for any large scale digitization project. At least have a look at it. First, the review of a biography of Schreiner:
Olive Schreiner, by Ruth First and Ann Scott, Schocken, 1980.
Just about 100 years ago unsuspecting Victorians found at their booksellers a slim volume by Ralph Iron bearing the rather innocuous title The Story of an African Farm. Assuming perhaps that the book was one of those morally uplifting tracts written by one of those muscular Christians who was out educating the heathen, they purchased it in large numbers. If many were immediately shocked by this immoral book, which was not authored by Ralph Iron and not at all concerned with animal husbandry, many others, particularly women, were deeply affected by its message. One woman wrote that this book along with A Doll's House, was one of the works "which drove most thinking women towards emancipation."
The author of the book is Olive Schreiner and it is she who is the subject of an excellent biography by Ruth First and Ann Scott. The authors do a fine job of portraying the life of this remarkable individual who later wrote another feminist classic, Women and Labour, which Vera Brittain has called "the Bible of the Women's Movement." Schreiner also wrote on other subjects ranging from pacifism to sex and while some argue that her political pamphlets are too poetic to be good propaganda and her novels too polemical to be examples of good prose, few doubt her essential integrity. Those who read this biography will be both entertained and saddened for Schreiner's story is not a happy one. The friend of such diverse people as Eleanor Marx and Cecil Rhodes (before she realized exactly what he had planned for the blacks) and Havelock Ellis and Mahatma Gandhi she was, nonetheless, pathetically lonely. Her freethinking, her sexual radicalism and her liberal stance on all issues cost her a great deal.
[The review concludes with this quotation from Schreiner which is a good early statement for those in favour of shattering glass ceilings. "From the judge's seat to the legislator's chair; from the statesman's closet to the merchant's office; from the chemist's laboratory to the astronomer's tower, there is no post or form of toil for which it is not our intention to attempt to fit ourselves; and there is no closed door we do not intend to force open."]
Sources:
It is well worth learning more about this South African feminist, socialist, pacifist, polemicist and writer of fiction. If those subjects are not enough to get you interested, I can also mention SEX since she had a relationship with Havelock Ellis. To quickly find out all you need to know, simply go to this website: The Olive Schreiner Letters Online.
Even if you are not interested in her or any of the subjects listed, you should still have a look at OSLO. Apart from being fully searchable it breaks her career and letters into all the categories one can imagine. You can even go quickly to the material involving Ellis if you are only interesting in seeing if there are any 'naughty bits'.
If you would like to see Schreiner's final resting place, seek accommodation at the Buffelshoek Dirosie Lodge near Cradock on the Eastern Cape. It looks like a beautiful spot.
The review appears in, Western's Caucus on Women's Issues, Vol. 1, No. 1, October 1981. p. 4.
That was the first issue of a newsletter produced at the University of Western Ontario. At the time, I was a Collections Librarian for American, Canadian and British history. Increasingly the subject of "Women" was to be found among other subjects in a variety of academic disciplines and I was asked to take some responsibility for "Women's Studies". Things were simpler then. There is now a person of the appropriate gender who acquires material in "Women's Studies and Feminist Research."
Post Script
On the other hand, some very low level nepotism may have been involved. I see that my wife (at that time) was the President of Western's Caucus on Women's Issues. Perhaps things weren't so simple.
While I could not determine the fate of the newsletter, the WCWI still exists.
No comments:
Post a Comment