Olive Schreiners Fiction

Olive Schreiner is one of those women writersÐÐsuch as Germaine de Stael, George Sand, or Margaret FullerÐÐwho has been more famous for her life, circle of friends, and proto-feminism than for her writings. These women are all known about but relatively unkown when it comes to a close study of their fiction. With Olive Schreiner's Fiction, Gerald Monsman has rectified that situation.
     Schreiner embodies an 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 imperialists 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. 
     In her fiction, Schreiner tried to use the master's own tools against him. Her insight, as Monsman sees it, is first to rearticulate the master plot--the religious foundation of equality.  Social morality, based on that foundation, necessarily demands that one heed more than the patriarchal story and that one listen to the voices and stories told by children, women, the land, and all its inhabitants. Monsman charts the topography of her imagery within her most significant imaginative works, and provides one of the first serious considerations of Schreiner's fiction.