South African novelist, feminist, and political polemicist Olive Schreiner has exerted a profound and continuing influence on many generations of thinkers and writers in South Africa, Europe, and the United States. As the first English-speaking novelist to give the indigenous landscapes of southern Africa a vivid fictional existence, showing memorable human beings growing up in the isolated terrain of the Karoo, and experiencing in that isolation the fears and doubts of Victorian Christians, as well as the power structures of colony and family, she etched powerful images of oppression and struggle on the international imagination by drawing on "the grey pigments" around her. Her depiction of Victorian religious crisis in a colonial setting in her famous 1883 novel, The Story of an African Farm, made southern Africa a reality to the metropolitan audience, and by linking feminist protest to colonial conditions she spoke to the awakening spirit of the...