Last month, while I was going through my private collection, I chanced to find a book which I had not opened even once, over the years. It is a book titled Rediscoveries edited with an introduction by David Madden, purchased some years back from the late Dr Bhaskara Rao of Philadelphia, a professor of English in American Universities. This book, I discovered contained several interesting essays by celebrated literary figures writing about the books they enjoyed, belonging to old times. (Annanis Nin rediscovery A Lesson in Music by Marianne Hanser, Jane Mayhall writing about Getride Stein’s Things as they are, Wallace Stegner’s Goodbye Wiscousin, so on.)

Though I don’t stand anywhere near these giants ‘whose life is literature’, I still wish to review some of the old books of enduring interest which either delighted me or ennobled me, one such book which left an inedible impression on me is The Story of an African Farm  by Olive Schreiner. This is her first novel, written under a pen name of Ralph Iron, published in 1883 – had attained great success at once.

Havelock Ellis, her life-long friend and an admirer criticised the book while reviewing in Indian Review as “The A-F was not to me, then or ever, what it seems to have been to many a revelation, a new gospel; nor was I able to accept it at all points either as fine art or as sound doctrine.”

Schreiner, while ignoring his adverse remarks compared him to a horse seller in South Africa who after admitting several defects in the horse, ultimately declared it as “but it’s a damned fine horse!” Later H Ellis declared as ‘what delighted me in the African farm was in part, the torch of genius, the freshness of its outlook, the firm splendour of its style, the penetration of its insight into the core of things; in part, my own personal sympathy with mental evolution described, all the more in the solitude of a remote southern land. I resolved to write to the author. So began what was, if not the longest, the largest correspondence of my life, and it continued without a break for 36 years. I first read ‘The Story of an African Farm’  when I was a teenage boy. Subsequently I reread it four times with great degree of zeal and enthusiasm. The master plot of this story can be analyzed as follows:
Principal characters

Tant Sannie: Farm woman whom an English man marries before his death leaving behind to care for his daughter and her cousin.

Lyndall Tant Sannies: Step-daughter, studious girl but with unconventional ideas and conduct, falls prey to an irresponsible man; finally betrayed becomes ill and dies shortly. 

Gregory Rose: A young Englishman, a tenant in the farm finds Lyndall in a hotel room sick and deserted, brings her body back to the farm for burial.

Em, Lyndall’s cousin:  A conventional young woman, betrothed to Gregory Rose: She doesn’t love him and breaks off the engagement. After Lyndall’s death Gregory proposes again and she accepts.

Waldo, the son of the German overseer on the farm: Like Lyndall, he is serious and studious leaves the farm and wanders off – While he returns to the farm disillusioned, he finds his kindred heart Lyndall whom he always loved is dead – one sunny day he also dies.

Bonaparte Blenkinis: A wicked and rascally character; was allowed to manage the farm temporarily by Tant Sannie. Bonaparte discharges the overseer, Waldo’s father; the latter dies of grief. When Tant Sannie discovers Bonaparte’s illicit relationship with her niece, drives him out from the farm.

Certain critical episodes are described in such graphic manner that the reader is totally engrossed in either tragic or comic scenes. Descriptions of human nature and the topography of South Africa and its vagaries of climate are so very realistic and graphic. Several Dutch and colonial words were used by the characters, to make it all the more down to earth narration. To cite an example the brutal way the German overseer, a caretaker of the farm was thrown out of the job after having served the owner for many years at the instance of the wicked newcomer Bonaparte. Agonizing the youngsters Lyndall and Em, both attached to the German overseer at the time of the latter’s exit. 

Apart from these there are instances of amusing episodes in the novel – Tant losing her temper and shouting in Dutch language wiping her moisture from her mouth with the palm of her hand.  Napoleon’s predicament about being driven by fear, one to the attack on him by a domestic bird and the solace he obtains from the German overseer is amusing. Sympathy and the generosity of the German overseer to the Khaffir woman, who was expelled from her farm along with her baby in her arms, when he finds her hiding behind bushes to prevent herself from the heat of the piercing sunrays – offering her food and some clothing to prevent the baby and herself from the cold during the night.

In 1923 A & C Black London, published a book called Books That Count – A dictionary of useful books. In this, it’s reported that Oliver Schreiner, the well-known South African writer eloquently urges that ‘woman should invade the whole realm of labour and become a fellow worker with man’.

She sees nothing incongruous in the notion that woman might “guide a Maxim or shoot down a foe with a Lee-Metford at 4000 yards as ably as any man”.