About the Author
Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner (1855-1920) was born on March 24, 1855, on the Cape Colony’s mountainous northeastern border. She was the ninth of twelve children of a missionary couple sent to Southern Africa by the interdenominational London Missionary Society in the late 1830s. She wrote The Story of an African Farm while serving as governess on farms in the Eastern Cape, and moved to England in 1881 to study medicine. She settled in London, where she soon began moving in progressive intellectual circles and became intimate friends with leading radical thinkers and writers.
