Olive Schreiner

Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) was a South African writer, feminist and political campaigner. The daughter of missionaries, she grew up in the Eastern Cape and worked as a governess on remote farms, where she wrote The Story of an African Farm, published in London in 1883 under the pen name Ralph Iron. The novel's frank treatment of religious doubt and women's lives made her famous. She later wrote allegories in Dreams, the political tale Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, and Woman and Labour, a key feminist text, and she opposed both imperialism and racial injustice.