Dreams

Olive Schreiner's life (1855-1920) straddled two centuries, two continents and two major wars, and she moved back and forth between fiction and non-fiction. Throughout her writing career, however, she employed the non-realist genres of dream, allegory and fable as a concise medium for expressing her passionately-held convictions about gender, religion, politics, social evolution and race.
Collected here for the first time are the two volumes of such tales published during her lifetime, together with a posthumous volume. This culminates in an essay where Schreiner sought to articulate the philosophy that had inspired her since, as a small girl she had experienced both an overwhelming sense of the injustices characterizing a land where 'the man with the gun was always there' and the accompanying conviction that those who strive to realise the ideal, however isolated they feel, are never quite alone in the universe.
Elisabeth Jay's introductory essay explores the way in which the evaluation of Schreiner's work has been complicated by the often highly politicized network of concerns, ideologies and literary forms her work traversed, before indicating the critical frameworks and theories that will provide the most helpful readings of these stories.