The Story of an African Farm

Lyndall, Schreiner's articulate young South African feminist, marks the entry of the controversial New Woman into nineteenth-century fiction. Raised as an orphan amid a makeshift family, she witnesses an intolerable world of colonial exploitation. Desiring a formal education, Lyndall leaves the isolated farm for boarding school in her early teens, only to return four years later from an unhappy relationship.
She is unable to meet the demands of her mysterious lover and retires to Bloemfontein. Delirious with exhaustion, Lyndall is unknowingly tended by an English farmer disguised as her female nurse. This is the devoted Gregory Rose, Schreiner's daring embodiment of the sensitive New Man. A cause célèbre when it appeared in London, "The Story of an African Farm" (1883) transformed the course of the late Victorian novel.
In it Schreiner boldly addresses her society's greatest fears - the loss of faith, the dissolution of marriage, and women's social and political independence.