Olive Schreiner (1855-1920)

Olive Schreiner (1855 - 1920)

Olive Emilie Albertina Screiner (1855-1920), was an author, pacifist and political activist. Her father, Gottlob Schreiner was a minister at the Wesleyan Missionary Society station at Wittebergen in the Eastern Cape, near Herschel. Her mother was Rebecca Lyndall.

She was named after her three older brothers who all died early: Oliver, Albert and Emile. Her fatehr was not particularly good at anything, and afetr being expelled from the missionary for trading against regulations tried several things unsuccessfully. The family lived in poverty. At an early age she rejected Christianity, and when she left school she became a governess on farms in the area. She would often be sexually harassed by her male bosses, and would resign, moving onto the next farm.

In 1894 she married a farmer, Samuel Cronwright. They never had children -- one born child died at only 1 day old.

She wrote novels such as The Story of an African Farm (1883), Dreams (1890), An English South African Woman's View of the Situation (1899), Woman and Labour (1911), Udine (published in 1929, but which she began around the early 1870s).

After her death she was originally buried, but later exhumed and buried on Buffelskop on the farm Buffelshoek, near Cradock, in the Eastern Cape.