‘Too Uncompromising a Figure to be So Disposed of’: Virginia Woolf and/on Olive Schreiner

Abstract

In her 1925 review of an edited collection of Olive Schreiner’s letters, Virginia Woolf described Schreiner as ‘too uncompromising a figure to be so disposed of’. Prompted by this intriguing comment, this article brings Woolf’s late-1920s writings into conversation with Schreiner’s novels and letters in order to trace personal and textual connections between the two authors. Comparative analysis of Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm (1883) and Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1927) and Orlando (1928) reveals similarities and confluences in their novelistic structures, experimental temporalities, allegorical representations, use of natural imagery, and in the central and unifying linear motifs that are used to hold together the novel forms. Additional modernist aesthetic and political links are provided by depictions of sex- and gender-crossing characters in Orlando, The Story of an African Farm and Schreiner’s From Man to Man (1926), as well as by the feminist arguments and role of ‘Shakespeare’s sister’ in From Man to Man and Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929). The article concludes by arguing that ‘Woolf and/on Schreiner’ provides evidence towards a claim for South Africa as a pioneering site of modernist innovation, and thereby contributes to new understandings of the development of global modernisms.

Keywords:

• Olive Schreiner
• Virginia Woolf
• modernism
• gender
• To The Lighthouse
• South Africa
• Orlando
• From Man to Man
• The Story of an African Farm

Acknowledgements

I gratefully acknowledge the Arts and Humanities Research Council for funding this research (grant reference AH/T008733/1). Thanks are also due to Sarah Baxter at The Society of Authors for permissions, and Matthew Whittle, Gemma Moss, Dan Wylie and Michael Durrant for reading and commenting on drafts.

Notes

1 Olive Schreiner lived in the same area of South Kensington as the Stephen family for a period (Behind the Times 19-20), and Schreiner met Woolf’s father, Leslie Stephen, whilst on holiday in the Swiss Alps. Schreiner’s first impressions were not entirely favourable, as she wrote to Henry Havelock Ellis (21 January 1887): ‘Leslie Stephen came to-day. He’s a tall thin ugly man, looks nice though, of course not a touch of genius’. https://www.oliveschreiner.org/vre?view = collections&colid = 137&letterid = 210 Accessed on 2 June 2021. According to Stephen’s biographer Noel Annan, Stephen’s opinion of Schreiner was no better. Though initially Stephen was pleased to meet ‘the wonderful Miss Schreiner’, he revised view this two days later, describing her as ‘clever, but, I should guess, hard and conceited’, and after a fortnight felt that ‘she disapproves of marriage and thinks that everybody should be free to drop everyone else – I should drop her like a hot potato’ (in Noel 110).

2 Olive Schreiner to Henry Havelock Ellis 1919. The Olive Schreiner Letters Online. https://oliveschreiner.org/vre?view=collections&colid=137&letterid=579 Accessed on 21 May 2021.

3 Though Woolf’s writing notebook of 1924–1925 contains only a single page of notes on Schreiner’s letters relating to pages 33–74 of the collection, I consider it likely that she did find the reference to Night and Day, as she includes a quote from p. 361 in the review, and the letter bearing her name appears on p.363. See Monk’s House Papers, University of Sussex Library: Bloomsbury Archive Monks House Papers/ SxMs-18/2/B/2/O. Entry 12: ‘African Farm. & Letters’.

4 This period relates to the novels under discussion as Schreiner wrote The Story of an African Farm in the 1870s and published it in 1883; and Woolf holidayed at Talland House near St Ives, which served as key inspiration for To The Lighthouse, between 1882–1895.

5 I have discussed this section of the novel at greater length elsewhere (Olive Schreiner and African Modernism 89–91).

6 To the Lighthouse Notes for Writing, Gallery, Berg Collection, New York Public Library http://woolfonline.com/?node = content/image/gallery&project = 1&parent = 6&taxa = 16&content = 732&pos = 4. Accessed 2 June 2021.

7 As before, I have discussed Schreiner’s view of the ‘intermediate sex’ in terms of evolutionary advancement in an earlier publication (Olive Schreiner and African Modernism 101–42).