The New Woman and Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm - Dr Hannah Helm

Dr. Hannah Helm from the University of Salford introduces the late Victorian concept of the New Woman – a figure associated with the first-wave feminists of the 1880s and 1890s who sought education, jobs, the right to vote, and new legal, medical, social and physical freedoms. As Dr Helm explains, the first New Woman novel (also the first South African novel) was The Story of an African Farm (1883), which was written by a teenage governess, Olive Schreiner, in the late 1870s/early 1880s. In the novel, the protagonist, Lyndall, expresses strongly feminist ideas that critique normative classed, gendered and racialised roles, challenge the social value placed on female beauty over intellect, and reach towards new possibilities for female agency in the Victorian period.

Further Reading

Ann L. Ardis, New Women, New Novels: Feminism and Early Modernism (Rutgers University Press, 1990)

Carolyn Burdett, Olive Schreiner (Tavistock: Northcote, 2013)

Ruth First and Ann Scott, Olive Schreiner: A Biography (Rutgers University Press, 1990)

Ann Heilmann, New Woman Strategies: Sarah Grand, Olive Schreiner, Mona Caird (Manchester University Press, 2004)

Jade Munslow Ong, Olive Schreiner and African Modernism: Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing (Routledge, 2018)

Jade Munslow Ong and Andrew van der Vlies, eds., Olive Schreiner: Writing Networks and Global Contexts (Edinburgh University Press, 2024)

Olive Schreiner, The Story of An African Farm (1883; Oxford University Press, 1998)  

---, Woman and Labour (T Fisher Unwin, 1911)

Anna Snaith, Modernist Voyages: Colonial Women Writers in London, 1890-1945 (Cambridge University Press, 2014)

Liz Stanley, Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman: Olive Schreiner’s Social Theory (Routledge, 2013)

---, Reintroducing Olive Schreiner: Decoloniality, Intersectionality and the Schreiner Theoria (Routledge, 2023)

Andrew van der Vlies, South African Textual Cultures: White, Black, Read All Over (Manchester University Press, 2007)