The Story of an African Farm
1883
Two girls and a boy play on a remote South African farm in the 1860s, dreaming of escape. Lyndall, sharp-featured and burning with ambition, refuses to accept that she'll marry and fade away in this brutal landscape. Em, golden-haired and gentle, finds solace in childhood's simple devotions. Between them stands Waldo, the boy who contemplates death and God with a philosopher's restlessness. As years pass, the Karoo's red earth and relentless sun shape lives of quiet desperation and quiet courage. Lyndall's forbidden desires and illegitimate child scandalize; Waldo's spiritual searching leads him toward something like sainthood; Em becomes the patient heart holding memory together. Written in 1883 by Olive Schreiner under a pseudonym, this was a bombshell of a novel: a woman writing openly about female desire, unmarried mothers, and a woman's right to refuse the only roles society offered. The landscape here is not backdrop but character, vast and indifferent, mirroring the existential loneliness at the novel's core. It remains startling for its honesty about what women wanted and feared, and what it cost them to want anything at all.
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“We have been so blinded by thinking and feeling that we have never seen the World.””
— Olive Schreiner
“All things on earth have their price, and for truth we pay the dearest. We barter it for love and sympathy. The road to honour is paved with thorns; but on the path to truth, at every step you set your foot down on your heart.””
— Olive Schreiner
“And so, it comes to pass in time, that the earth ceases for us to be a weltering chaos. We walk in the great hall of life, looking up and round reverentially. Nothing is despicable - all is meaningful; nothing is small - all is part of a whole, whose beginning and end we know not. The life that throbs in us is a pulsation from it; too mighty for our comprehension, no too small.And so, it comes to pass at last, that whereas the sky was at first a small blue rag stretched out over us and so low that our hands might touch it, pressing down on us, it raises itself into an immeasurable blue arch over our heads, and we begin to live again.””
— Olive Schreiner
“Experience teaches us in a millennium what passion teaches us in an hour.””
— Olive Schreiner
“Only the sea is like a human being . . .always moving, always something deep in itself is stirring it. It never rests; it is always wanting, wanting, wanting. It hurries on; and then it creeps back slowly without having reached, moaning. It is always asking a question and it never gets the answer.””
— Olive Schreiner
“I am not in so great a hurry to put my neck beneath any man's foot; and I do not so greatly admire the crying of babies””
— Olive Schreiner
“Men are like the earth and we are the moon; we turn always one side to them, and they think there is no other, because they don't see it”
— Olive Schreiner
“When the curtain falls no one is ready””
— Olive Schreiner
“Marriage for love is the beautifulest external symbol of the union of souls, marriage without it is the uncleanliest traffic that defiles the world.””
— Olive Schreiner
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Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-story-of-an-african-farm-d5796da9-cdbc-4aaf-bf3e-87c346592625.Schreiner, O. (1883). The Story of an African Farm. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-story-of-an-african-farm-d5796da9-cdbc-4aaf-bf3e-87c346592625Schreiner, Olive. The Story of an African Farm. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-story-of-an-african-farm-d5796da9-cdbc-4aaf-bf3e-87c346592625.
