Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Olive Schreiner
-
Standard Name: Schreiner, Olive
Birth Name: Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner
Pseudonym: Ralph Iron
OS
was a political and social activist as well as a writer. Her biographer Liz Stanley says she was internationally probably the best-known feminist writer and theorist from the 1880s through to the 1930s.
Stanley, Liz. “Encountering the Imperial and Colonial Past through Olive Schreiners Trooper Peter Halket of MashonalandWomens Writing, Vol.
7
, No. 2, 2000, pp. 197-19.
198
Much of her writing strongly advocates a more democratic, just, free society, using to do so the art of allegory and the parable. Her early novels were followed by a large number of political essays. Later, she published the feminist testament which made her an icon in the women's movement in the early decades of the twentieth century. She carried on a voluminous correspondence with many family members and friends, the latter including Havelock Ellis
, Edward Carpenter
, and Karl Pearson
. Several volumes of these have been published posthumously, as were two early novels which she deemed unpublishable during her lifetime.
VL
was a passionate pacifist and anti-fascist. She contributed generously to any appeal made to advance international understanding, the cause of peace, or social progress.
Gunn, Peter. Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856-1935. Oxford University Press, 1964.
199
She wrote anti-war articles for newspapers (Olive Schreiner
politics
Hannah Lynch
Barine lived as a New Woman in her independence and her intellectual productivity, but her style was self-consciously feminine, and she deplored the left-wing feminism of writers like Olive Schreiner
and George Egerton
, whom...
politics
Margaret Haig Viscountess Rhondda
That autumn, against the wishes of both her father and her husband, she joined the WSPU
, organising a local branch at Newport, South Wales. She paid her one-shilling annual membership fee and pledged...
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Bland, Lucy. Banishing the Beast: Feminism, Sex and Morality. Tauris Parke, 2002.
6
politics
Isabella Ormston Ford
She was also a member of the London-based Writers' Club
, the Women's Institute
—which embraced an educational programme of appalling size, to the frivolous mind—and the Pioneer Club
, which counted IOF
,...
Publishing
Vernon Lee
VL
's political stance was seen as dangerously unpatriotic: only a few of her essays were published by the Labour Leader, Nation, and New Statesman. In letter to Havelock Ellis
in September...
Reception
Amy Levy
A revival began with Melvyn New
's edition in 1993 of her Complete Novels and Selected Writings.
Beckman, Linda Hunt. Amy Levy: Her Life and Letters. Ohio University Press, 2000.
2
Although AL
's poetry is comparatively slighted in this edition, her work has been regularly included...
Reception
Mona Caird
Where literary historian John Sutherland has called MCone of the most aggressive of the New Woman novelists,
qtd. in
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Ann Heilmann
(who has led the scholarly rediscovery of the story of Caird's life) has argued that...
Residence
Constance Lytton
Only a few months before she died CL
, still partly paralysed, made another attempt at independent life, moving from her mother's house at Knebworth to a flat in Tavistock Square in Bloomsbury, central...
Textual Features
Doris Lessing
This includes autobiographical, African, and critical essays (on the work of herself and others, notably an Afterword written for a 1968 edition of Olive Schreiner
's Story of an African Farm).
Influenced by Olive Schreiner
's Dreams, 1890, the collection consisted of four stories allegorically treating the themes of religion, class, sex, and daydreams.
Bentley, Phyllis. "O Dreams, O Destinations". Gollancz, 1962.
102, 126
Johnson, George M., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 191. Gale Research, 1998.
23
Textual Production
Michelene Wandor
Nonetheless, several of her plays have never (in 2008) been staged. One is Wild Diamonds, set in South Africa and seen through the eyes of Olive Schreiner
and Cecil Rhodes, which was commissioned...
EPL
published at least eight suffragist pamphlets from 1907 to 1915. In one of these, A Call to Women (undated), published by the National Women's Social and Political Union
, she quotes from a letter...
Textual Production
Elspeth Huxley
EH
thought a perfect precept for biography was voiced by Shakespeare
's Othello: nothing extenuate, nor set down ought in malice.
qtd. in
Nicholls, C. S. Elspeth Huxley. HarperCollins, 2002.
