0,49 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Niedrigster Preis in 30 Tagen: 1,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
"From Man to Man" is a profound exploration of gender dynamics, societal norms, and the quest for individual identity, set against the backdrop of 19th-century South Africa. In this novel, Olive Schreiner employs a distinctive narrative style that weaves together rich, lyrical prose with philosophical musings, creating a lingering sense of both intimacy and universality. The story follows the intertwined lives of its protagonists, delving into the complexities of love, duty, and liberation within a patriarchal society, and reflects the burgeoning feminist discourse of its time. Olive Schreiner was a trailblazing feminist and social critic, whose own experiences in colonial South Africa significantly informed her writing. Born into a missionary family, Schreiner's upbringing instilled in her a sense of social justice and a keen awareness of the roles prescribed to men and women. Her unique perspective as a woman in a male-dominated landscape, along with her interest in social and political issues, fueled her desire to grapple with themes surrounding gender and autonomy in her work. This book is highly recommended for readers interested in feminist literature, social criticism, and historical contexts. Schreiner's insights resonate powerfully today, making "From Man to Man" not only a vital work of the late 19th century but also an essential text for understanding the ongoing dialogues around gender and identity. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
From Man to Man
Table of Contents
Introduction
At once intimate and insurgent, From Man to Man traces a woman’s effort to move from inherited dependence toward a self defined by conscience, knowledge, and love, testing how far she can reimagine the terms of kinship, labor, and desire within a world that continually translates her personhood into duty and silence, as she passes from girlhood through the respectabilities of adulthood and measures the private cost of conforming, the risks of refusing, and the possibility that change might require not escape but a remaking of everyday relations.
Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), South African novelist and social thinker, developed this work over many years; it appeared posthumously in 1926 as From Man to Man; or, Perhaps Only—. Set largely in colonial South Africa in the late nineteenth century, the book is a realist social and domestic novel inflected by philosophical reflection. Its long gestation gives it a layered texture, balancing embodied scenes with meditation. Readers familiar with Schreiner’s concerns will recognize her sustained engagement with gender, conscience, and the pressures of respectability. The setting’s agricultural and small‑town rhythms provide a grounded backdrop for its searching interiority.
Without relying on sensational turns, the narrative follows a girl in a settler household as she grows into a woman negotiating marriage, kinship, sexuality, and work in a society that measures female worth by relation to men. The scope is extended, unfolding across years, and the emphasis remains on perception—the slow education of feeling and thought—rather than spectacle. Everyday encounters, domestic routines, conversations, and small acts become catalysts for reflection. The opening movement situates readers within family expectations and early ties, establishing the responsibilities that will test the protagonist’s sense of justice and her capacity for affection without self‑erasure.
Schreiner favors lucid, unadorned prose that turns quietly incisive, combining scene‑building with passages of analysis that read like thinking in action. The narration moves closely with the protagonist’s sensibility, attentive to bodily experience and to the moral tremors beneath ordinary choices. Dialogue is purposeful and exploratory; description is economical but telling, often revealing the financial, legal, and emotional structures that scaffold intimacy. The mood is earnest yet tender, occasionally austere, guided by a conviction that clear seeing can be transformative. The result is a contemplative, immersive reading experience that provokes thought without sacrificing the felt texture of domestic life.
At its core the novel interrogates the sexual double standard and the economic terms that bind women to roles they have not freely chosen. It asks what education—of the mind, but also of habit—can make possible, and what limitations even conscientious love can impose. Motherhood appears as both fulfillment and constraint; solidarities among women emerge as fragile yet vital resources. The narrative also explores work as dignity and as dependency, and probes how ideals of purity or propriety can mask transactions of power. Across these threads, Schreiner returns to responsibility: to oneself, to others, and to the future one helps to shape.
Because the story unfolds within a colonized society, its domestic scenes are shadowed by wider hierarchies of status and belonging. Class distinctions, patterns of service, and the authority of law shape what seems private, and the crossing of thresholds—from private rooms to public venues—reveals how closely personal fate is stitched to public order. Schreiner does not turn the book into a tract, yet she insists that questions of gender cannot be separated from questions of power. The novel’s attention to place and custom underscores how reform is lived: incrementally, over time, argument by argument, choice by choice.
For contemporary readers, From Man to Man offers a candid inquiry into autonomy and care that speaks beyond its historical moment. It appeals to those who value psychological depth and ethical debate as engines of narrative, and to anyone curious about how literature registers social transformation at the scale of the household. Its patience rewards slow reading: motifs introduced early gather resonance as the protagonist’s understanding widens. The questions it poses—about consent, obligation, economic dependence, and the uses of affection—remain pressing, making Schreiner’s novel feel at once of its time and urgently present.
Synopsis
From Man to Man follows the life of a thoughtful young woman growing up on a remote South African farm in the late nineteenth century. She and her sister mature under the watch of strict parents and a social order that clearly delineates gender, class, and race. The protagonist is observant and bookish, sensing early the limits placed upon her curiosity and movement. Her sister, more celebrated for outward charm, draws different expectations. The setting, with its harsh beauty and complex colonial dynamics, shapes the questions the young woman carries forward about work, duty, affection, and the worth assigned to different lives.
As the sisters come of age, the protagonist seeks learning wherever she can find it, often in secret. She studies languages and reads late into the night, forming a vision of person-to-person respect that challenges household rules. Encounters with workers and neighbors expose inequalities that trouble her conscience. Meanwhile, her sister attracts suitors and navigates social rituals with ease. The family anticipates marriages that will secure stability. Through small incidents of kindness and rebuke, the narrative shows how expectations press upon both sisters, laying the groundwork for later choices about love, independence, and the possibility of an equal partnership.
The protagonist enters marriage with hope for companionship rooted in shared mind and feeling. Domestic life, however, narrows her world. Household labor, social calls, and the overseeing of a farm staff consume her days. She negotiates the tension between the work expected of her and the private study that sustains her sense of self. Early disappointments suggest that affection alone cannot make a union equitable. As she confronts financial concerns and community scrutiny, she begins to test small strategies to preserve her autonomy, quietly rearranging time and duties to keep space for thought, writing, and a more humane understanding of others.
Motherhood deepens her responsibilities and expands her sympathies. Caring for children while maintaining the household, she recognizes how custom shapes every interaction, from the nursery to the front room. She seeks to nurture curiosity in her children, resolving not to pass on limiting beliefs about gender or origin. At night she resumes her studies, piecing together a personal philosophy from history, science, and letters. Her relationships with servants and neighbors draw her into the moral questions of the wider society, where the same double standards that constrict her also determine the fate of those with fewer protections or chances.
A pivotal crisis makes the sexual double standard unmistakable. The protagonist confronts the consequences of choices made by men in power and the vulnerability of women whose options are few. The event strains her marriage and tests her principles, exposing how social prejudice intersects with class and race. Rather than answer injury with bitterness, she attempts practical compassion, shielding those at risk and negotiating with a community quick to condemn. The episode sharpens her resolve to ground her life in fairness and truth, even when such commitments bring gossip or isolation, and it propels her toward broader thinking about reform.
As she steadies her household, the protagonist opens her door and her mind to those living at the margins, especially women entangled in economic dependence or coerced relationships. She studies widely, corresponding with distant acquaintances and refining her convictions about education and mutual respect. The care of children remains central, and she gradually shapes a plan to give them a more expansive future. Without breaking ties, she reorganizes her days to include purposeful reading and deliberate acts of support for others. The narrative traces these incremental changes, presenting a life built less by dramatic rupture than by sustained, thoughtful effort.
Travel to England broadens her perspective. In a bustling city of libraries, lecture halls, and reform societies, she encounters new ideas and practical strategies for social change. She meets people who recognize her intellect and engage her as an equal, even as she contends with financial constraint and loneliness. Letters home underscore her continuing commitments and the pull of family duty. The contrast between metropolis and colony clarifies the structures that shape both places. She gathers tools for self-support and returns to her responsibilities with a firmer sense of how education and economic independence can improve everyday life.
Back in her familiar landscape, the protagonist integrates what she has learned into the rhythm of care, work, and study. She pursues modest self-reliance, safeguards the well-being of dependents, and encourages the children in habits of inquiry. Relations with neighbors steady, guided by a reputation for fairness rather than deference. Her thinking crystallizes around a simple ethic: meet each person as a human being, not as a role or category. The narrative emphasizes continuities rather than neat breaks, showing how conviction, once formed, is carried forward in household decisions, friendships, and the education she provides.
The novel closes on an open, forward-looking note that underscores its central purpose: the movement from dominance and dependency toward mutual recognition across gender and race. Without resorting to melodrama or a tidy resolution, it affirms education, economic agency, and everyday kindness as practical means to better relations. Major turning points have redirected the protagonist’s path, but the emphasis remains on gradual transformation. From Man to Man presents, in sequence, a life shaped by constraint and steadily reoriented by principle, inviting readers to understand the costs of inequality and the promise of meeting one another as equals.
Historical Context
From Man to Man is set chiefly in the late nineteenth-century Cape Colony, on the vast, semi-arid Karoo, with scenes that move to Cape Town and, crucially, to London. The action unfolds across the Victorian decades into the 1890s, when sheep-farming districts, mission settlements, and port towns were being reshaped by imperial trade and labor migration toward new mining centers. Domestic interiors—farmhouses staffed by Black and mixed-race servants under Roman-Dutch law modified by British ordinances—frame conflicts over gender, race, and authority. The imperial link is constant: ships, remittances, and ideas flow between Britain and southern Africa. Schreiner locates intimate lives within a frontier society structured by patriarchal power, racial hierarchy, and accelerating economic change.
The abolition of slavery in the Cape in 1834, with a compulsory apprenticeship period until 1838, left a deep imprint on household relations and rural labor. Freedom was quickly circumscribed by Masters and Servants Acts (from 1856, with later amendments), which criminalized breaches of contract, regulated movement, and preserved coercive leverage over African and “coloured” workers. Domestic service remained the most visible site of racialized dependency. Schreiner’s novel registers this legacy in its portrayal of nursemaids, farmhands, and the intimate, unequal proximities of the colonial home. It exposes how the sexual double standard and paternal power—long reinforced by slavery’s afterlife—shaped white women’s and Black workers’ vulnerability in everyday life.
The Mineral Revolution transformed southern Africa after diamonds were found along the Orange River in 1867 and at Kimberley in the early 1870s, followed by the 1886 discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand and the rapid founding of Johannesburg. By 1888, Cecil Rhodes consolidated De Beers, and the mid-1880s compound system confined African miners to tightly controlled barracks. These changes drew tens of thousands of men from farms to mining camps, accelerated urban growth, and created new markets—and dangers—for women’s labor, including prostitution, in Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Kimberley, and the Reef. Alongside this, British debates over sexual regulation roiled the metropole: the Contagious Diseases Acts (1864, 1866, 1869) subjected women in garrison towns and ports to forcible examination until their repeal in 1886, after campaigns led by Josephine Butler. The Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885 raised the age of consent in England and Wales from 13 to 16 and expanded penalties for procurement, amid W. T. Stead’s sensational “Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon” (1885) and a transnational panic about “white slavery.” Maritime routes linked London and Southampton to Cape Town and Kimberley, moving both labor and moral policy across the empire. Schreiner’s novel is interlaced with these realities: it tracks the gendered economy that made marriage, dependency, and commercial sex contiguous responses to precarity. Its crossings between the Karoo and London mirror the circuits through which women could be commodified, regulated, or “rescued,” and its critique of the sexual double standard speaks to both the mine-compound world and the metropolitan reform regimes that claimed to protect women while policing them.
Aggressive imperial expansion under Cecil Rhodes shaped regional politics in the 1890s. The British South Africa Company received its royal charter in 1889, pushed into Mashonaland and Matabeleland (wars in 1893–1894), and catalyzed the ill-fated Jameson Raid of December 1895–January 1896 against the Transvaal. The raid’s failure forced Rhodes to resign as Cape prime minister in 1896. Schreiner, a public critic of Rhodesian conquest and mining capitalism, wrote against this ethos of profiteering and coercion. In the novel, the ethic of command, exploitation, and risk-taking associated with imperial adventurism is refracted into domestic relations, where male prerogative and economic power structure women’s choices and freedoms.
The Glen Grey Act of 1894, promoted by Rhodes, reorganized African land tenure in the eastern Cape, instituted individual titles, and imposed labor taxes designed to push African men into wage work. In parallel, the Cape’s property-based nonracial franchise was curtailed by the Franchise and Ballot Act of 1892, which raised qualifications and introduced literacy hurdles. Early colonial prohibitions on interracial sex (for example, in the Transvaal in 1903) culminated in the Union-wide Immorality Act of 1927. Schreiner’s narrative, attentive to interracial intimacy and the unequal domestic order, anticipates these racialized controls: it shows how law and custom sought to police the household, sexuality, and labor, making the private sphere a crucible of colonial governance.
The South African War (1899–1902) pitted the British Empire against the two Boer republics and ushered in scorched-earth tactics and concentration camps. Approximately 26,000 Boer women and children died in the camps, alongside at least 14,000 Black Africans held in separate facilities. The war militarized society, dislocated rural households, and hardened racial and political divisions that persisted into Union (1910). Schreiner opposed the war in tracts such as An English South African’s View of the Situation (1899) and chronicled its toll on civilians. While not a war novel, From Man to Man bears the war’s imprint in its insistence on women’s unpaid labor, grief, and endurance amid absent men and authoritarian structures.
Debates over women’s legal status framed the era. In Britain, the Married Women’s Property Acts of 1870 and 1882 allowed wives to hold earnings and property, while suffrage organizations expanded—the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies in 1897 and the Women’s Social and Political Union in 1903. In the Cape and, later, the Union, Roman-Dutch “marital power” gave husbands guardianship over wives’ legal capacity, a constraint lingering well into the twentieth century; white women organized in bodies such as the Women’s Enfranchisement Association of the Union (1911), gaining the vote in 1930. Schreiner’s novel, and her essay Women and Labour (1911), engage these contexts by exposing how marriage law, education, and economic dependence confine women.
As a social and political critique, the novel exposes the architecture of Victorian-colonial patriarchy: marital power, the sexual double standard, racialized domestic service, and economic dependence. It shows how imperial capitalism and law penetrate the household—organizing intimacy, labor, and motherhood—while rendering women morally accountable and legally constrained. By juxtaposing Karoo farm life with metropolitan London, the book links colonial exploitation to British moral regulation, indicting the way both societies commodify women’s bodies and work. Its attention to interracial proximity challenges the racial order’s myth of separation, and its insistence on women’s education and autonomy confronts class privilege, legal inequity, and the political economy that moves women “from man to man.”
From Man to Man
INTRODUCTION
On the first day of May, 1873, Olive Schreiner, then just eighteen, was living in tents at New Rush[1], the two-year-old Diamond Diggings now known as Kimberley. On that day she entered in her journal that she had written out the first chapter of Other Men's Sins, a name that does not appear again; but, when she was governess at the farm Ratel Hoek, she entered in her journal on the 3rd of August, 1876, that she had made up her mind "to write A Small Bit of Mimosa and Wrecked in one"; on the 21st of the same month that she had "Got some idea of Saints and Sinners"; and on the 10th of September "Saints and Sinners is growing clearer." I am inclined to think that, when she decided to blend A Small Bit of Mimosa and Wrecked (both then mentioned for the first time), she incorporated Other Men's Sins into the same plan. At any rate, we now have this novel fairly started; for Saints and Sinners was "the original germ," as she styled it, of From Man to Man. Not only did she tell Havelock Ellis this in 1884, but it is abundantly clear otherwise. For instance, in September, 1883, she enters in her London journal that she is "At the Jew and 'Rain in London,'" which is now Chapter XI of this novel; and she adds: "Thought of a name. From Man to Man." This title is taken from a sentence of John (later Lord) Morley's, which runs as follows, except that I have forgotten the adjective: "From man to man nothing mutters but...charity." The missing word connotes "boundless," "all-embracing," or some such large and generous attitude of mind.
Olive sailed to England for the first time early in March, 1881, taking with her Saints and Sinners (as far as it was completed), in addition to The Story of an African Farm. While governessing at Ratel Hoek and Lelie Kloof she had apparently made considerable progress with Saints and Sinners. For instance, at Lelie Kloof, in October, 1880, this entry occurs in her journal: "Had an idea about Bertie this afternoon—suicide, quite strong"; Bertie being one of the two chief characters of the novel. Such a reference seems to indicate that she had already made considerable progress in the plan of the work, for Bertie's death is bound to come late in the book.
From May, 1876, to November, 1883, this novel is always referred to as Saints and Sinners; thereafter it is styled From Man to Man. I have no recollection that, after November, 1883, she ever referred to it, in speech or in writing, by any other name than From Man to Man; though, while we were "detained" by the British military at Hanover during the greater part of the Boer War, I typed "The Prelude," the first six chapters and part of the seventh, as she revised them in 1901 and 1902.
When we lived at De Aar, from 1907 onwards, it was her custom (necessitated by ill-health) to leave home every year to escape the great summer heat of the upper Karoo. She often spent a large part of such absences in Cape Town; she was there in 1911, and then had "The Prelude" and the first six chapters retyped in triplicate and sent to me by the typist from Woodstock (a suburb of Cape Town). Knowing what the package contained, I do not think I opened it then; I have no recollection of having done so; nor do I remember having then seen the alterations she had made in the Dedication and the Title. I put the package carefully away, and, when I left De Aar in December, 1919, stored it there with my other things. Olive, who had sailed to England early in December, 1913, was unable to return to South Africa; and so, being free on retiring from De Aar, I went to England in 1920. She returned to South Africa in August of that year, leaving me to follow after the winter, but she died in her sleep at Wynberg in December.
I returned to South Africa in February, 1921, but was too much occupied to get my De Aar things down to Cape Town and go through the papers until the end of that year; then I opened the Woodstock package that had been posted to me in March, 1911. At that time I knew the book as From Man to Man, and by no other title; and I was familiar with the dedication, which, before the death of our baby in 1895, ran, "To My Little Sister, Ellie, who died, aged eighteen months," with the relative couplet that now appears in the present dedication. In the Hanover typing of 1901-02, the title and dedication remain the same except for the following addition: "Also to My daughter and only child, Born the 30th April 1895, and Died the 1st May, aged one day. She never lived to shed a woman's tears." In the Woodstock typing of 1911 the title appears as The Camel Thorn, but the pen has been run through it and a new title, Perhaps Only, substituted therefor. (The Camel-thorn, Afrikaans Kameel-doring, is Acacia giraffae.) The new title is taken from a sentence uttered by the little child in "The Prelude": "Perhaps only God knew what the lights and shadows were." She wrote this sentence (which appears on p. 67 of "The Prelude") beneath the typing of the Woodstock title-page. I give a facsimile of the sentence as she wrote it with the pen, and in the same relative position.
The Woodstock dedication, as then typed, reads thus:—
Dedicated to My Little Sister Ellie Who died, aged eighteen months, when I was nine years old. * Also to My Only Daughter. Born on the 30th April, and died the 1st May. * She never lived to know she was a woman.
The last line, so typed, stands wholly excised by Olive with pen and ink. The couplet under the dedication to little Ellie, as it now appears in this book, indicates the astounding effect Olive claims the infant's brief life and early death had upon her own life.
Except that the title (The Camel Thorn) is crossed out and Perhaps Only is written above it in largish letters, the "prelim." page of the Woodstock typing is as follows:—
THE CAMEL THORN Prelude The Child's Day * The Book The Woman's Day * Part 1 (List of six chapters as they now appear.)
The original plan, or one of the early plans, of the novel was, as I understand it, that The Child's Day should be Part 1, The Woman's Day Part 2, and Rebekah Part 3. I give a copy of an old page, just as I found it in Olive's handwriting:—
Chapter 8. Bertie wants Dorcas to hold her hand. Chapter 9. Showing how Veronica took hens to the old farm. Chapter 10. Bertie ties ribbons round the kittens' necks. Chapter 11. Bertie seeks for the country and cannot find [it]. Chapter 12. "Sally is my Sweetheart, Sally is my darling." End of Part 2. Rebekah. * Chapter 1. Great White Angels. Chapter 2. Rebekah's Books are Dead Chapter 3. The Waterfall. Chapter 4. Muizenberg. Chapter 5. Sartje. Chapter 6. Koonap Heights. Chapter 7. The Old Farm. Chapter 8. Baby-Bertie. Chapter 9. A Bit of Mimosa. Chapter 10. How the Wax Flowers Smell.
I now give a list of the chapters of what the whole novel was at one time meant to be, just as I found it:—
Perhaps Only. Prelude: The Child's Day. The Book: The Woman's Day.Part one of the Woman's Day Chapter 1. Showing what Baby-Bertie thought of her new tutor and how Rebekah got married. Chapter 2. A Wild-Flower Garden in the Bush. Chapter 3. The Dam Wall. Chapter 4. Showing how Baby-Bertie heard the Cicadas cry. Chapter 5. John-Ferdinand shows Veronica his new House. Chapter 6. How Baby-Bertie went a-dancing. Chapter 7. You cannot capture the Ideal by a Coup d'Etat.Part 2 of the Woman's Day. Chapter 1. Fireflies in the Dark. Chapter 2. The Little Black Curl. Chapter 3. The Rocks again. Chapter 4. Koonap Heights. Chapter 5. The Glittering of the Sand. Chapter 6. Veronica. Chapter 7. The Lure Light. Chapter 8. A Bit of Mimosa. Chapter 9. The Kopje.The End
The thirteen chapters, as presented in this book, are all in the order in which Olive meant them to be. Chapter XIV, "The Pine Woods," was begun; but as there are less than a thousand words, as they are of no importance to the narrative, are unrevised, and lead nowhere, I do not think it necessary to give them. After the opening lines, Rebekah and Drummond begin a conversation which, as far as it goes, has no significance, except possibly for its last few lines:
"'Have you ever hated anyone?' he asked.
"She sat upright: 'No, not if hatred means the wish to injure. I have loathed people; I have tried to forget some people.'"
There the manuscript ends. There is not another word of the novel or of anything in connection with it. It is as though nothing more had ever been written. It was a custom with her to retain not only her first rapid drafts, but also any manuscript she had gone over and revised. For instance, there were three drafts of The Buddhist Priest's Wife, each progressively shorter than the previous one and none of them quite complete; to get the final draft I had to sort out the last two drafts in several ways—by handwriting, by age of the paper, and so one—then get the (often wrongly numbered) sheets into consecutive order respectively, then compare and adjust them. It was much the same with On the Banks of a Full River, and with several other of her writings. And so it was with this uncompleted novel; there were a considerable number of drafts of parts; there were fragments, revisions, etc.; but none of these had any relation to the book after the thirteenth chapter, except the few words, already referred to, of the fourteenth. I feel certain that she had "finished" the novel in her mind; I think she had not only thus "finished" the plan of it, but had done so in considerable detail in parts; nothing, however, short of clear proof, will convince me that she wrote down any more after the few words I possess of the fourteenth chapter. I am unable to think she destroyed any of the manuscript of the fourteenth chapter or of any later chapters. After all her assertions, verbal and written, it may seem difficult to believe that her actual writing ceased with the beginning of Chapter 14; and yet that seems to me by far the most likely explanation. (Readers are referred, for comparison, to the strange story, related in the Life, of the "Big Sex Book.") Considering that she kept so much of the rejected, revised and incomplete manuscripts of other books while still working on them, that she actually did the same with this specially loved and valued novel, knowing well also the unreliability of her statements about her work, I am simply unable to believe she destroyed the balance of the manuscript of From Man to Man. I do not believe a balance existed. Well, there is the fact, which, extraordinary as it is, yet cannot seem so extraordinary to me as it may to other people. I have been carefully through all her papers; the manuscript of the novel, in whatever confusion, was in one bundle (as was, I think, each of her other sets of manuscripts); and there is not a single scrap of paper after the few opening lines of the fourteenth chapter. It is my considered opinion that she wrote no further than where the manuscript now ends, but that later, at various times and irregular intervals (sometimes intervals of years), she went back to the beginning and to other early parts and set to work on revision. If she had quite abandoned all hope of further work on this beloved book, if she had decided on its destruction and had had sufficient strength to carry out such decision (which I doubt), she would, in my opinion, have destroyed the whole novel except "The Prelude"; she would not have destroyed merely a portion of the unrevised manuscript and left the revised and unrevised remainder. But I do not believe she ever abandoned all hope of still doing some work on the novel, and I do not believe she had it in her heart to destroy this greatly loved offspring of her mature mind any more than it could be in her heart to destroy a child of her physical body.
At the end of Chapter XIII, I give a brief account of what she told me as to the ending of the book. It is remarkable and fortunate that the novel does not stop until the tale is told almost to completion, and that the short account I am able to add will largely satisfy a legitimate desire of those whose interest will lie mainly in the incidents of the narrative; though, to all who love her work and recognize her power, there must ever remain the deep regret that she was unable to wind up the tale herself.
As to the name of the book, I have decided after much thought not to use the title I prefer (and which indeed I wish the book could be known by), but to adopt the one already familiar from its frequent use in the Life and Letters—the only title I ever heard Olive use. It seems to me that some confusion would result from the exclusive use of Perhaps Only; I do not feel at all sure that she would have used it; I am inclined to think she would have retained the title From Man to Man. As far as I know, the titles Camel Thorn and Perhaps Only were never mentioned to any person. Yet, though I believe I have decided rightly, I deeply regret that Perhaps Only—(so she wrote it) cannot be used except as an alternative title. As apparently her last choice, one might well expect it to be the most suitable, expressing with rare art, by the use of those words taken from the wondering and deep-piercing mind of the child, a kind of stunned reluctance to judge the meaning (if there be a meaning) and the incomprehensibility of the "ethic" (if there be an ethic) in the awful and mysterious living cosmos.
For purposes of this Introduction I went carefully through both the Life and the Letters and copied out practically every reference to the novel contained therein. When all the extracts were before me in chronological order, I decided to leave them to tell their own tale. And so there follow, as a kind of supplement to this Introduction and without comment, nearly all of such references, made by herself and in her own words.
In dealing with the unrevised original text of the novel all I could do legitimately was, as far as possible, to give it to the world in the form in which Olive left it. I have striven to present it exactly as she might have presented it, if she herself, without further rewriting, had reduced to its final word-form the unrevised manuscript that came into my hands.
Olive loved this book more than anything else she ever wrote, and, of the book, she loved "The Prelude" best. I have therefore printed "The Prelude" (The Child's Day) just as it stands in the Woodstock typing of 1911, and as revised by herself at the time.
It may interest readers to know that many references to "the old farm" are applicable to Klein Ganna Hoek, the farm where she was governess in 1875 and 1876, and where she wrote nearly all of Undine and much of The Story of an African Farm. But some other farm or farms, which I cannot identify, though I suspect Ratel Hoek for one and possibly Lelie Kloof, must also have been in her mind. "The Child's Day" is certainly almost wholly autobiographical: to take one small incident—she herself built the little mouse-house on the bare rock at Witteberg and waited for the mouse and then fashioned her hand to imitate the mouse entering into it.
S. C. Cronwright-Schreiner. Cape Town, South Africa, March, 1926.
I. THE PRELUDE—THE CHILD'S DAY
The little mother lay in the agony of childbirth. Outside all was still but the buzzing of the bees, some of which now and then found their way in to the half-darkened room. The scent of the orange trees and of the flowers from the garden beyond, came in through the partly opened window, with the rich dry odor of a warm, African, summer morning. The little mother groaned in her anguish.
Old Ayah, the Hottentot[2] woman, stood at the bedside with her hands folded and her long fingers crooked, the veins on the back standing out like cords. She said, "O ja, God! Wat zal ons nou seg!"* and readjusted the little black shawl upon her shoulders. The window was open three inches, and the blind was drawn below it to keep out the heat. The mother groaned.
[* "Oh yes, God! What shall we now say?"]
At the end of the passage in the dining room the father sat with his elbows on the deal table and his head in his hands, reading Swedenborg[3]; but the words had no dear meaning for him. Every now and then he looked up at the clock over the fireplace. It was a quarter before ten, and the house was very quiet.
At the back of the house, on the kitchen doorstep, stood Rebekah, the little five-year-old daughter. She looked up into the intensely blue sky, and then down to the ducks who were waddling before the lowest step, picking up the crusts she had thrown to them. She wore a short pink-cotton dress with little white knickerbockers buttoned below the knees and a white kappie[5] with a large curtain that came almost to her waist. She took the kappie off and looked up again into the sky. There was something almost oppressive in the quiet. The Kaffir[6] maids had been sent home to their huts, except one who was heating water in the kitchen, and the little Kaffirs were playing away beyond the kraal[4]s on the old kraal heap. It was like Sunday. She drew a slight sigh, and looked up again into the sapphire-blue sky: it was going to be very hot. The farmhouse stood on the spur of a mountain, and the thorn trees in the flat below were already shimmering in the sunlight. After a while she put on her kappie and walked slowly down the steps and across the bare space which served for a farmyard. Beyond it she passed into the low bushes. She soon came to a spot just behind the kraal where the ground was flat and bare; the surface soil had been washed off, and a circular floor of smooth and unbroken stone was exposed, like the smooth floor of a great round room. The bushes about were just high enough to hide her from the farmhouse, though it was only fifty yards off. She stepped on to the stone slowly, on tiptoe. She was building a house here. It stood in the center of the stone floor; it was a foot and a half high and about a foot across, and was built of little flat stones placed very carefully on one another, and it was round like a tower. The lower story opened on to the ground by a little doorway two inches high; in the upper story there was a small door in the wall; and a ladder made of sticks, with smaller sticks fastened across, led up to it. She stepped up to the house very softly. She was building it for mice. Once a Kaffir boy told her he had built a house of stones, and as he passed the next day a mouse ran out at the front door. She had thought a great deal of it; always she seemed to see the mouse living in the house and going in and out at the front door; and at last she built this one. She had built it in two stories, so that the family could live on the lower floor and keep their grain on the top. She had put a great flat stone to roof the lower story, and another flat stone for the roof on the very top, and she had put a moss carpet in the lower floor for them to sleep on, and corn, ready for them to use, above. She stepped very softly up to the house and peeped in at the little door; there was nothing there but the brown moss. She sat down flat on the stone before it and peered in. Half, she expected the mice to come; and half, she knew they never would!
Presently she took a few little polished flat stones out of her pocket and began to place them carefully round the top to form a turret; then she straightened the ladder a little. Then she sat, watching the house. It was too hot to go and look for more stones. After a while she stretched out her right hand and drew its sides together and made the fingers look as if it were a little mouse and moved it softly along the stone, creeping, creeping up to the door; she let it go in. Then after a minute she drew it slowly back and sat up. It was becoming intensely hot now; the sun beating down on the stone drew little beads of perspiration on her forehead.
How still it was! She listened to hear whether anyone from the house would call her. It was long past ten o'clock and she was never allowed to be out in the sun so late. She sat listening: then she got a curious feeling that something was happening at the house and stood up quickly and walked away towards it.
As she passed the dining-room window, whose lower edge was on a level with her chin, she looked in. Her father was gone; but his glasses and his open book still lay on the table. Rebekah walked round to the kitchen door. Even the ducks were gone; no one was in the kitchen; only the flames were leaping up and crackling in the open fireplace, and the water was spluttering out of the mouth of the big black kettle. She stood for a moment to watch it. Then a sound struck her ear. She walked with quick, sharp steps into the dining room and thresher kappie on the table and stood listening. Again the sound came, faint and strange. She walked out into the long passage into which all the bedrooms opened. Suddenly the sound became loud and clear from her mother's bedroom. Rebekah walked quickly up the cocoanut-matted passage and knocked at her mother's door, three short, sharp knocks with her knuckle. There was a noise of moving and talking inside; then the door opened a little.
"I want to come in! Please, what is the matter?"
Some one said, "Shall she come in?" and then a faint voice answered, "Yes, let her come."
Rebekah walked in; there was but a little light coming in under the blind through the slightly opened window. Her mother was lying in the large bed and her father standing at the bedside. A strange woman from the next farm, whom she had never seen before, sat in the elbow chair in the corner beyond the bed, with something on her lap; old Ayah stood near the drawers, folding some linen cloths.
Rebekah stood for a moment motionless and hesitating on the ox skin in the middle of the floor; then she walked straight up to the strange woman in the corner.
"Ask her to show you what she has got, Rebekah," said her father.
The woman unfolded a large brown shawl, inside of which there was a white one. Even in the dim light in the corner you could see a little red face, with two hands doubled up on the chest, peeping out from it.
Rebekah looked.
"Was it this that made that noise?" she asked.
The woman smiled and nodded.
Her father came up.
"Kiss it, Rebekah; it is your little sister."
Rebekah looked quietly at it.
"No—I won't. I don't like it," she said slowly.
But her father had already moved across the room to speak to old Ayah.
Rebekah turned sharply on her heel and walked to the large bed. Her mother lay on it with her eyes shut. Rebekah stood at the foot, her eyes on a level with the white coverlet, looking at her mother.
As she stood there she heard old Ayah whisper to the father, and they both went out, to the spare bedroom opposite. The strange woman came and bent over the mother and said something to her; she nodded her head without opening her eyes. The woman made a space at her side and laid the white bundle down in it; she put the baby's head on the mother's arm. The mother opened her eyes then and looked down at it with a half smile, and drew the quilt up a little higher to shield it. Rebekah watched them; then she walked softly to the door.
"Please open it for me." she said. The handle was too high for her.
The woman let her out.
For a moment she stood outside the closed door, looking at it, her tiny features curiously set almost with the firmness of a woman's; then she turned and walked down the passage. She saw her father and old Ayah come out of the spare room. Old Ayah locked the door and put the key into her pocket, and they went back to her mother's bedroom.
Rebekah picked up her kappie from the dining-room table, put it on, and went out again on to the steps at the kitchen door. The sun was blazing in the yard now; the very stones seemed to throw up a red reflection. Standing on the top step in the shade. Rebekah shivered with heat.
Then she wandered slowly down the steps and across the yard. She could feel the ground burn under her feet, through the soles of her little shoes. She walked to her flat stone. The mouse house stood baking in the sun with all the little crystals in the rock glittering. She sat down before the house, drawing her skirts carefully under her, the rock burnt so. She drew her knees up to her chin, and folded her arms about them, and sat looking at the mouse house. She knew she ought not to be there in the hot sun; she knew it was wicked; but she liked the heat to burn her that morning.
After a while the little drops of perspiration began to gather under her eyes and on her upper lip; she would not wipe them off. Her face began to get very red, and her temples to throb; the heat was fierce. She looked out at the mouse house from under her white kappie with blinking red eyes. She could feel the heat scorching her arms through her little cotton dress, and she liked it.
By half past eleven the heat was so intense she could not bear it, and there began to be a sound like a little cicada singing in her ears, so she got up, and walked slowly towards the house, but did not go in at the kitchen door.
She went to the back, where the wall of the house made a deep shadow, and went to the window of the spare room. It was her favorite place, to which she went whenever she wanted to be quite safe and alone. No one ever went there. The beds were generally left unmade till visitors came, with only the mattresses and pillows on them, and under one bed she kept her box of specially prized playthings. She unclosed the outer shutters. The window was so low that she could easily raise the sash and climb in from the ground. She pushed it up and stepped into the room. It was beautifully cool there and almost dark: she drew up the blind a very little to let in some light. She was walking towards the bed under which her box was, when something struck her eye. On the large table in the middle of the room there was a something with a white sheet spread over it. Rebekah walked up to it; this was something quite new.
She drew a chair to the side of the table and climbed up. She lifted the top of the sheet. Under it there was another sheet and a pillow, and, with its head on the pillow, dressed in pure white, was a little baby. Rebekah stood upright on the chair, holding the sheet in her hand.
After a while she let it down carefully, but so turning it back that the baby's face and hand were exposed. How fast it was sleeping!
She bent down and peered into its face. There was a curious resemblance between her own small, sharply marked features and those of the baby. She put out her forefinger gently and touched one of its hands. They were very cool. She watched it for some time; then she climbed down and went to the wardrobe where the best going-to-town clothes were kept hanging. With some difficulty she unhooked a little fur-trimmed red cape of her own; with this she climbed back on to the chair and laid it across the baby's feet. It was evidently not warm enough, though the day was hot.
She bent down over it again. On the top of its head was a little mass of soft, downlike curly black hair; she put her face down softly and touched the hair with her cheek and kissed it. She dared not kiss its face for fear of waking it. She sat down beside it, motionless, for a long time, on the edge of the table. Seeing it did not stir, after a time she climbed down, and taking off her shoes and leaving them at the foot of the table, went on tip-toe to the bed and drew from under it her box.
It was a large soap box with an odd collection of things in it. On the top was a dried monkey's skin and a large alphabet book with colored pictures; below were different little boxes and bags; some held stones; one was full of brightly colored beetles and grasshoppers she had picked up dead; in one, all by itself, was a very large bright crystal, carefully wrapped in cotton-wool and tied with a string. Below, was an oblong-shaped, common brown stone about eighteen inches in length; it was dressed in doll's clothes and it had a shawl wrapped round it. Beside il was a small shop-doll with pink cheeks and flaxen hair, which she had got on her last birthday; but it had no shawl and its face was turned to the wood. The stone she had had two years, and she loved it; the shop doll was only interesting. Besides these there was a round Bush-man stone with a hole in the middle, which she had picked up behind the kraal, and a flat slate-colored stone with the impression of a fossilized leaf, which she found on the path going up to the mountain; and at the very bottom in the corner was a workbox, with a silver thimble and needles and cottons inside, which she thought very grand: and two little brightly colored boxes with chocolates and peppermints with holes through them like whistles, which she had got on Christmas Day, but thought too pretty to eat; and there was also a head of Queen Victoria[9], cut out of the tinsel label of a sardine tin, and which she kept wrapped up in white paper.
She took all the things out of the box and handled them carefully, deliberating for a while. At last she selected the alphabet book, the Bushman stone, the silver thimble and a paper of needles. Queen Victoria's head, and a stick of chocolate. When she had packed the other things back, she went with them to the table. She climbed up on the chair. She laid the thimble and paper of needles on the cushion on the left of the baby's head, and the Bushman stone and the tinsel Queen Victoria head on the right. Very gently and slowly she slipped the alphabet book under the baby's doubled-up arm; and then, turning back the silver paper at one end of the chocolate stick, she forced the other end very gently into its closed fist, leaving the uncovered end near to its mouth. Then she stood upright on the chair with her hands folded before her, looking down at them all, with a curious contentment about her mouth.
After a little time she got down and went to her box at the foot of the bed, and sat down upon it; to wait till the baby woke.
Her face was seamed under the eyes with lines hot perspiration and dust had left, and she was very tired. She leaned her arm on the bed and rested her head on it.
At half-past one it was dinner-time, and old Ayah could not find her. She often crept in the heat of the day behind the piano or into the wagon-loft, and fell asleep there where no one could discover her. So old Ayah put some dinner for her in a tin plate in the oven to keep warm.
Then everyone went to lie down; the shutters of all the doors and windows were closed, and there was not a sound in all the house but the buzzing of the flies in the darkened rooms.
Only old Ayah did not sleep to-day and was sewing a piece of white calico into a long, narrow, white robe with a stiff frill down the front for a tiny baby. She sat working in the dining room with the shutters very slightly apart to let in enough light.
When she had done it she went down the passage to the door of the spare room and unlocked it.
The first thing she noticed was that the outer shutters she had left carefully closed were partly open, that the window had been raised, and the blind was an inch or two drawn up. She walked to the table. The baby lay with the sheet removed from its face, and the Bushman stone, and thimble, and needles, and a picture, on its pillow, and the alphabet book under its arm, and the chocolate stick in its hand. She glanced round. Rebekah was still sitting on her box at the foot of the bed with her stockinged feet crossed and her head resting on her arm on the mattress, fast asleep, her shoes standing side by side at the foot of the table.
Old Ayah walked up to her and shook her by the shoulder. Rebekah opened her eyes slowly and looked at her dreamily, without raising her head.
"What are you doing in here? Couldn't you see, if the door was locked, that you weren't meant to get in here?" she said in the Cape Dutch she always spoke.
Rebekah sat up, still looking round vacantly; then in an instant all came back to her and she stood up.
"Aren't you a wicked, naughty child, letting all the flies and the sun come in! What have you been doing?"
"Oh, please don't talk so loud," whispered Rebekah quickly, bending forward and stretching out her hand; "please, you'll wake it!"
"O Lord!" said old Ayah, looking at her, "what would your mother say if she knew you'd been in here playing with that blessed baby? You naughty child, how dared you touch it!"
"It's mine: I found it!" said Rebekah, walking softly up to the foot of the table.
Old Ayah came up, too.
"Oh, please," said Rebekah, putting out her hand again, "don't touch it! Don't touch it! I don't want it waked!"
She looked up at old Ayah with full lustrous eyes, as a bitch when you handle her pups.
"O my God!" said old Ayah, "the child is mad! How can it be yours? It's your mother's."
"It is mine," said Rebekah slowly: "I found it. Mietje found hers in the hut, and Katje found hers behind the kraal. My mother found hers that cries so, in the bedroom. This one is mine!"
"O Lord, Lord!" cried old Ayah. "I tell you this is your mother's baby; she had two, and this one is dead. I put it here myself."
Rebekah looked at her.
"This one is dead: it'll never open its eyes again; it can't breathe."
The old Hottentot woman began taking the alphabet book from under its arm and the stick from its hand, and took the things from the pillow.
Rebekah did not look at her; her gaze was fixed on the baby's face.
"Here, take these things!"
But Rebekah raised out her hand, and touched the baby's feet; a coldness went up her arm, even through the sheet. She dropped her hand.
"Child, what is it? Here!—take your shoes!"
She thrust the shoes into her hand. Rebekah held them, but let them slide between her fingers on to the floor; she was still staring at the table.
Old Ayah gathered up the child's apron and put into it the things she had taken from the baby, and forced the shoes back into her other hand.
"Here, take them, I say, and go away! And get your face washed and your hair done, and tell Mietje to put you on a clean dress and white pinafore. What would your mother say to see you looking such an ugly, dirty little fright?"
Rebekah turned away slowly, with the gathered apron in one hand and the shoes in the other, and walked to the door. When she got there she turned and looked dreamily back; then she went out into the passage.
After she had had her face washed and her hair brushed, and had got on a clean starched pink dress and a white over-all pinafore, she went to the dining room. Old Ayah had put her plate of warmed dinner on the table ready for her, and she sat down on the bench to eat it. She felt better now she was washed and had a clean starched dress on.
The heat outside was still very oppressive, and only a little light came in through the cracks in the shutter; and the blue flies were buzzing round everywhere in the dark. She did not feel very hungry, and played with her dinner, but she drank all the water in her mug. Then she pushed her plate from her, found her kappie, and went out into the great front room. All was quiet there also, and almost quite dark. She took a large worn picture-book from the side table, and opened the double door and went out on to the front stoep*. The vine leaves on the front wall hung dry and stiff, and even the orange leaves on the great orange trees before the door hung curled and flaccid.
[* Stoep; stone-flagged veranda.]
It was nearly three o'clock, and the heat was hardly less intense than at midday, though there was already shade on that side of the house. The hollyhocks and dahlias in the flower garden beyond the orange trees were hanging their heads, and the four-o'clocks were curled up tight, though the trees sheltered them.
She walked down through the flower garden, on into the orchard beyond.
All was very still and brown there. The little peach trees that stood in rows were shedding their half-ripe fruit, which fell into the long yellow grass beneath them, and the fig trees along the wall had curled up the edges of their leaves. Rebekah followed a little winding foot-path among the grass to the middle of the orchard, where a large pear tree stood, with a gnarled and knotted stem. There was a bench under the tree, and the grass grew very long all about it. She looked around to find a spot where the tree cast a deeper shade than elsewhere. Here she walked round and round on the grass, like a dog, and then lay down on her back in the place she had made. It was like a nest, with the grass standing several inches high all round.
She drew up her legs, cocking one knee over the other, so that one foot waved in the air.
It was very nice. She lay for a while with her hands clasped across the top of her head, from which she had thrown her white kappie. The pear-tree leaves were so thick overhead you could hardly see any sky through them. She yawned luxuriously. Beyond the edges of the pear branches, here and there as you looked through half-closed eyes, were strips of blue sky, and some great, white masses of thunder cloud were showing in them, like ships sailing in the blue. She watched them for a while with her eyes half shut; then she took up the book that lay on the grass at her side, stood it open on her chest against her knee, and gently waved the foot that was cocked up in the air.
The book opened of itself about the middle of a certain page. On it was a picture: Peter, a great boy with a red face, looking out through the top of the letter P, and at his feet was a little pig with a curled tail. Besides this there were in the picture, in the distance, fields and a stile, and a winding path leading far away over the hills; and in the foreground was a milestone with weeds growing around it; below was written, "P stands for Peter and Pig."
She had had the book ever since she could remember, she had kept it very clean; there was no torn place or mark in it; but the page of Peter and his Pig was brown and worn round the edges. It was her favorite picture. Whenever she looked at it she wanted to make up stories. She had made one long story about it: how people were not kind to Peter and he had no one to love him but his pig, and how they both ran away together by that far-off road that went over the hill, and saw all the beautiful things on the other side. She liked this book better than her new books. She stood it up on her chest and looked into the picture. But to-day it had no meaning; it suggested nothing. Then she looked away again beyond the edges of the pear branches, where two great masses of white cloud were floating in the blue; they dazzled her eyes so she closed them.
Presently she made a story that one of those clouds was a ship and she was sailing in it (she had never seen the sea or a ship, but she was always making stories about them), and, as she sailed, she came at last to an island. The ship stopped there. And on the edge of the shore was a lady standing, dressed in beautiful clothes, all gold and silver. When she stepped on to the shore the lady came up to her and bowed to her, and said, "I am Queen Victoria. Who are you?"
And Rebekah answered her, "I am the little Queen Victoria of South Africa."
And they bowed to each other.
(The child under the tree moved her head very slightly, without opening her eyes.)
The Queen asked her where she came from. She said, "From a country far away from here: not such a very nice country! Things are not always nice there—only sometimes they are."
The Queen said, "I have many islands that belong to me, but this Island belongs to no one. Why don't you come and live here? No one will ever scold you here, and you can do just what you like."
Rebekah said, "I should like It very much; but I must first go and fetch my books out of the ship." And when she had brought her books, she said to the Queen. "Here is a little box of presents I have got for all the people who live on the farm where I used to live: for my father and my mother and the servants and the little Kaffirs—and even old Ayah. Would you please give it to them as you go past?" And the Queen said she would; and she said, "Good-by, little Queen Victoria!" And Rebekah said, "Good-by, big Queen Victoria!" and they bowed to each other, and the old Queen went away in the ship in which she had come.
Then she was all alone on her island. (She had never seen an island except a lump of ground in the furrow, with some thyme and forget-me-nots growing on it; but when she grew up she found she had pictured that island just as a real island might have been!) The island had many large trees and bushes, and the grass and thyme and forget-me-nots grew down to the water's edge. She walked a little way and she came to a river with trees on each side, and on it were two swans swimming, with their long white necks bent. She had had a book with the picture of a swan swimming in a lake, and she had always thought she must die of joy if she should see a real swan swimming up and down. And here were two!
A little farther, on the bank of the river, there was a little house standing. It was as high in proportion to her as grown-up people's houses are in proportion to them. The doors were just high enough for her to go in and out at, and all things fitted her. One room was covered with books from the floor to the ceiling, with a little empty shelf for her own books, and there was a microscope on the table like her father's which she was never allowed to touch; but this one was hers!
Outside, in the garden, there were little rakes and spades that came as high as her shoulder. (Rebekah had always had to dig with a man's spade that made her arms ache.) At the side of the house there were all the things lying one uses for building houses; and a pile of bricks; and a bit of bare ground where you could make as much mud as you liked and make more bricks. But she hadn't time to stay and make bricks then. She went on farther.
