Schreiner Reader

31:4 Book Reviews as a dissertation and then as a book, both originally in French. In translation some of Nordon's text and references were omitted—with Nordon's permission —and Redmond finds the English language version slightly less useful than the French. Though Nordon's biography is objective and filled with facts, it is at times a bit dry. In his essays Lellenberg contends that there has been no definitive and completely satisfactory biography of Doyle. Each biographer demonstrates a particular bias concerning Doyle's life and Doyle's writing, often considering only parts of Doyle's life and career. However, the essays in this book are much more than a mere review of the biographies of Doyle. They form a fascinating study in the methods and the pitfalls of biography. After reading this book, which examines all the important biographies of a single individual, one wonders if the cumulative portraits we derive from biographies of other famous figures are equally flawed or skewed. Edward Lauterbach Purdue University SCHREINER READER An Olive Schreiner Reader: Writings on Women and South Africa. Ed. Carol Barash. Afterword by Nadine Gordimer. London and New York: Pandora Press, 1987. Cloth $32.00 Paper $12.95 Appearing in this collection of essays and stories by turn-of-the-century South African feminist, anti-colonialist, and pacifist Olive Schreiner is a personal allegory called "A Dream of Wild Bees." In a vision, a pregnant woman is visited by Health, Wealth, Fame, Love, and Talent, each of whom, in tum, offers to bless her ninth child, as yet unborn. Instead, the mother accepts the offer of a sallow-faced, hollow-cheeked visitor who promises that he will awaken in the child's blood a burning fever—a fever to follow a path traced out in the sand by a finger which no one else sees; the child will hunger for love, yet give it up, attending always to the voice within and its command—"Renounce! renounce! this is not thine"; and the child shall fail where others reach the goal, for strange voices shall call and strange lights beckon and the child shall see a blue sea where others see only the desert's waste. But there is one reward for a life lived bereft of health, wealth, fame, love, and recognition : for the ninth child, the ideal shall be real. Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner was the ninth child of missionary parents, who named her after three dead brothers. She went on to become the author of the suffragette "Bible," Woman and Labour, and the first novel about her native land to gain widespread European success, The Story of an African Farm. At its best, her writing speaks to the overwhelming sense of helplessness we, as individuals, feel in the face of institutionalized evil—a world of international politics that, in Schreiner's words, "hideously enlarges" the greed, ambi484 31:4 Book Reviews tion, the cruelty and falsehood of the individual soul. Schreiner, the ninth child, responds: in that one small, minute spot in the universe where your will rules, "there where you alone are as God, strive to make that you hunger for real!" In confronting the sexual, racial, and economic oppression of her time, she assures us that she has tried mightily not to "wear blinkers" or hold a veil before her eyes. But ever since Schreiner was "rediscovered" in recent years by feminist and Marxist critics alike, a great effort has been made to see her in terms of the inevitable blinkers and veils that curtailed her vision (assuming, of course, that modem readers have veils of their own to contend with). Indeed, Barash's introduction and Nadine Gordimer's afterword bracket the Schreiner essays and in effect fashion a picture of the author as a creature of her time and place—after Darwin, and contemporaneous with Marx. A true Victorian liberal, Schreiner was caught between two worlds, one dying and the other powerless to be bom. A white woman in South Africa, she was both oppressor and oppressed—a voice crying in a wilderness of burning homesteads, witness to generations of men who killed for land or gold or simply for the...