The Story of an African Farm is one of the earlier example of the New Woman in fiction. We first meet Lyndall as a very young child, an English orphan living with her cousin and her cousin’s widowed step-mother on a farm in South Africa. She grows up to be independently-minded, philosophical, and forceful. She also makes it quite clear at one stage that she believes it “must be a terrible thing to bring a human being into the world… I have no conscience, none… but I would not like to bring a soul into this world.” The idea of any woman deciding to reject maternity or motherhood is something even today some do not understand, but in 1883 it would have elicited an even stronger reaction.

It’s not surprising that Lyndall is reluctant to bring another life into her world. She and the other farm inhabitents have known little else other than pain, toil, and worry. Tant’ Sannie, the Boer-Woman who is to look after Lyndall and her cousin Em until Em is old enough to inherit the farm, has any number of men from the area trying to inveigel their way into her life and affections (and money). She dislikes the children and claims she would hit them if she weren’t so afraid of the ghost of her husband punishing her for it. All Lyndall wants is to be allowed to go away to school, and to learn everything in the world.

As Lyndall is on this developmental journey, so is the young German boy, Waldo, who works on the farm. From a young age, he has been in the grips of a spiritual and religious struggle, now believing that God loves him, now being convinced that he is unworthy of God’s love. He grows up to be deeply introspective and serious, desperately trying to find prove of God’s existence, and of His love. Unsurprisingly, there is a connection between Lyndall and Waldo. While they do not understand each other’s plights exactly – Lyndall comes back from school railing against the unequal treatment of women, which Waldo can’t relate to, while Lyndall is a confirmed non-believer – but they sympathise with each other as they try to work through their respective struggles.

Three days after finishing this book, I can’t quite make up my mind what I think of it. The first half of the book is a straight narrative, which reads quickly, while the second half tends towards the more philosophical. If I’m honest, I’m not quite sure if the philosophical passages always work particularly well. They are there to give insight into the minds of Waldo and Lyndall, but – and perhaps this is my feminist bias – I do think that Lyndall’s internal life is more convincing that Waldo’s. That may be because Schreiner herself was a feminist, and called herself a freethinker after losing her faith when her 2-year-old sister, Ellie, died. Interestingly, though, Schreiner was a maternal-type. She was apparently desperate for a child, and finally gave birth to a daughter in 1895, when Schreiner was 40. Tragically, the baby died within 16 hours, and Schreiner never had another child.

The other aspect of the book I found difficult to reconcile is the racism. Racist terms are used openly throughout the novel, and for this leftie-feminist, it was quite galling. Without wishing to make excuses for Schreiner, her language when referring to black South Africans would have been commonplace in the 1880s, at the height of imperial expansion, though this doesn’t mean we should excuse it. The word ‘kaffir’, which is used repeatedly throughout the novel, was a derogatory term even in the author’s day. At this time, too, there was the rapid growth in ideas surrounding eugenics, selective breeding, and “racial science” – which would go on to reach its hideous height during the Nazi era – though as Patricia O’Neill points out in her introduction to the Broadview edition of the novel, Schreiner only makes explicit reference to this trend once, and that is via Tant’ Sannie, a character which is ridiculed anyway. So, is Schreiner’s open racism an unconscious, priviledged position, rather than an active part of her thought-process? Is it inherent rather than premeditated? I don’t know. It’s just difficult to reconcile when she seems to have such progressive views on women.

The Story of an African Farm is certainly an interesting, thought-provoking book, if not always a complete joy to read. But would I recommend it to anyone who isn’t specifically interested in the era, or in early literary representations of feminism? Probably not, if I’m honest.