First edition

Very beautiful writing, and empathic treatment of the characters, delving into their hearts and souls.

Still, it's hard to care so much for those characters, being European and descendent's of those who committed genocide on true Africans. The author also seems to be a sizist, making "good women" tiny, and much emphasis put on "tiny hands, tiny feet."

I did like the treatment of how we feel when death steals a beloved, and our struggles to try to believe in the hereafter, because we can't bear the thought of never seeing that dear one again, in whatever form. ( )

In memory of Vera and Roland

Anyone reading this in hopes of learning something about 19th century colonial agronomy will be sorely disappointed: apart from the occasional mention of goats and sheep, this book is a farming-free zone. Maybe crops are being grown off-stage by indentured natives (or "woolly Kaffers" to use the author's terminology), but the Karoo farmstead where Schreiner lays her scene is a venue for delvings and harrowings of the philosophical rather than the agricultural sort.

The story, such as it is, concerns the growing-up of Waldo, Em and Lyndall. Em, nice but dim, is the stepdaughter of the twice-widowed but still ebullient farm proprietress Tant Sannie (or "the Boer woman" as the text prefers to call her). The precocious Lyndall, also an orphan, is Em's cousin. Waldo, a spiritual seeker, is the son of the German overseer. In part one their lives, hardly blissful to begin with, take a turn for the worse when one of the most preposterous baddies in all of literature shows up in the form of Bonaparte Blenkins, a sadistic conman who makes your average Dickens villain look like a Proustian character study. He wheedles his way into Tant Sannie's affections and proceeds to be utterly beastly to the kids, while Waldo grapples with the contradictions of religion and Lyndall with her awakening feminism.

Finally Blenkins comes unstuck and Tant Sannie kicks him out. Then it's time for Schreiner to lay it on thick with a section called "Times and Seasons", a rudely interpolated Ted Talk on the stages of (Waldo's, but also every thinking man's) religious development. There's an even more nauseating excursus a bit later, when a stranger passes through the farm and narrates a Bunyanesque allegory to Waldo ("then the hunter took from his breast the shuttle of Imagination, and wound on it the thread of his Wishes; and all night he sat and wove a net.") I think the phrase "show, don't tell" is very overused, but every writer should keep it in mind to avoid producing deadly stuff like this.

I suppose this is why people read the book today, for its atheist and feminist themes (the feminism comes later as we see what became of Lyndall). Fair enough, but I found it torturous. Schreiner's prose, not what you'd call subtle, veers wildly between mawkish (any description of Lyndall), archaic (three uses of "ever and anon", "Em needed not to send for him", "next morning the Bible we kiss") and unintentionally hilarious ("the hypocrite is rare as icebergs in the tropics"). Sometimes she comes up with glutinous gems like "he fixed his seething eyes upon her" and "the beautiful eyes looked into the depths of her soul".

There was one scene that I didn't have to force myself through like a wagon driver lashing his oxen up a muddy kopje: Tant Sannie eventually remarries and we're treated to a Boer wedding. Of course, being a Boer wedding it's not as much fun as a Greek wedding for example or an Armenian or a Hindu one. But there is still dancing, and a better spread than the usual roaster-cakes and mealies, and some people at least (go Em) enjoy themselves. The other incident that piqued my interest was when Gregory (another random who shows up at the farm later on and falls in love with first Em and then Lyndall) suddenly puts on womenswear and seems quite pleased with himself. But it turns out his transvestism is only the act of a lovesick mooncalf: by disguising himself as a woman, he hopes to get closer to little Lyndall and her little head, face, lips, hands, fingers...

This brings me to my last point. Schreiner's feminism is powerfully and clearly expressed through the character of Lyndall. But in proportion as she draws Lyndall's personality as independent, rational, and generally by contemporary standards unwomanly, she seems to feel the need to describe her physically as dainty, delicate, the image of womanly weakness. Perhaps this is ironic or a spoonful of treacle to help her controversial message go down. But she isn't terribly creative in how she does it. I did some textual analysis and it turns out the word "little" appears 508 times in The Story of an African Farm, accounting for one in every 200 words — five times its frequency in English as a whole. By my count 74 of these usages are in reference to Lyndall. They break down as follows:

Lyndall generally — 18
Parts of Lyndall — 56:

Hand(s) — 12
Foot/feet/footmarks — 11
Face — 5
Mouth — 4
Finger(s) — 4
Lip(s) — 3
Laugh — 3
Head — 3 (of which 1 indirect)
Chin — 2
Body — 2
Limbs, fingernail, arms, cheek, teeth, neck, life, toe, elbows, voice, soul — 1 each

That is, the only parts of Lyndall that aren't little are her nose, ears, eyes, jaw, tongue, shoulders, hips, knees, calves, ankles. We are told that she is "beautiful" three times, and that her eyes are "beautiful" no fewer than eight times. It's absolutely mad. Someone please enroll Olive in a creative writing class or just buy her a bloody thesaurus! ( )

For those people that are less gifted at reading literature — which definitely includes me — this book is very heavy weather. I read it because it was mentioned in a biography I've just read of Eleanor Marx and nothing about the experience was enlightening.