Dreams

This volume brings together for the first time the entire range of the shorter pieces of imaginative writing that she continued to produce throughout her life, together with her final account of the vision informing her life’s work. It rescues Schreiner from the charge of having exhausted a slim talent in one semi autobiographical novel and provides a context in which to situate a woman writer whose idealist concerns recognised no simple geographical boundaries. To picture her as first and foremost a colonial writer or, alternatively, primarily as a member of the finde-siecle British avant garde, does little justice to the links she made in her own writing and to the complex situation she occupied, for Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner’s life (1855-1920) straddled two centuries and two continents, while her travels between the land of her birth, South Africa, and her family’s European homeland embroiled her in the political ferment of two wars: the Boer War (1899-1902) and the first World War (1914-1918).