LibraryThe Story of an African Farm

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The first great South African novel — and a girl on the Karoo who refuses to be owned.

The Story of an African Farm

Olive Schreiner · 1883

Schreiner published this in 1883 under a man's name, and gave Lyndall a full-throated case against marriage as ownership a decade before the 'New Woman' had a name. Around her she built something stranger: a colonial farm where faith is lost and remade, a conman preys on the credulous, and the veld itself seems to think. It is the book that put South Africa into the English novel, and its two questions — what a woman may do with her one life, and what remains when belief goes — have not aged.

Set on a colonial-era Karoo farm, the novel contains period racial language and attitudes toward Black and Khoisan South Africans, reproduced unaltered from the 1883 text.
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28 chapters · 100,848 words · ~7.6 hr read

Contents

Preface

Schreiner's preface to the second edition, signed 'Ralph Iron' — her defense of a story where strangers come and go as they do in life.

Part I

Childhood on the Karoo farm: Waldo's crisis of faith, and the coming of the conman Bonaparte Blenkins, who charms, schemes, and finally overreaches.

Part II

Three years on: the meditation 'Times and Seasons,' two strangers with two philosophies, and Lyndall's return — a woman demanding a life the world is not ready to give.