The Story of an African Farm, by Olive Schreiner

The Story of an African Farm, by Olive Schreiner. Penguin Modern Classics, The Penguin Group (SA). Cape Town, South Africa 2007. ISBN  9780143185604 / ISBN 978-0-14-318560-4

The Story of an African Farm, by Olive Schreiner. Penguin Modern Classics, The Penguin Group (SA). Cape Town, South Africa 2007. ISBN 9780143185604 / ISBN 978-0-14-318560-4

Olive Schreiner's story of an African Farm has been the forerunner of all the novels of the Modern Woman. Who could have foreseen that the new and most distinctive note of the literature of the last decade would be sounded by a little chit of a girl reared in the solitude of the African bush?

Olive Schreiner  

The full African moon poured down its light from the blue sky into the wide, lonely plain. The dry, sandy earth, with its coating of stunted karoo-bushes a few inches high, the low hills that skirted the plain, the milk-bushes with their long, finger-like leaves, all were touched by a weird and an almost oppressive beauty as they lay in the white light. In one spot only was the solemn monotony of the plain broken. Near the centre a small, solitary koppie rose. Alone it lay there, a heap of round ironstones piled one upon another, as over some giant's grave. Here and there a few tufts of grass or small succulent plants had sprung up among its stones, and on the very summit a clump of prickly pears lifted its thorny arms, and reflected, as from mirrors, the moonlight on their broad, fleshy leaves. At the foot of the koppie lay the homestead. First, the stone-walled sheep kraals and Kaffir huts; beyond them the dwelling-house - a square red-brick building with thatched roof. Even on its bare red walls, and the wooden ladder that led up to the loft, the moonlight cast a kind of dreamy beauty, and quite etherealised the low brick wall that ran before the house, and which enclosed a bare patch of sand and two straggling sunflowers. On the zinc roof of the great open waggon-house, on the roofs of the outbuildings that jutted from its side, the moonlight glinted with a quite peculiar brightness, till it seemed that every rib in the metal was of burnished silver. Sleep ruled everywhere, and the homestead was not less quiet than the solitary plain. In the farmhouse, on her great wooden bedstead, Tant Sannie, the Boer-woman, rolled heavily in her sleep. She had gone to bed, as she always did, in her clothes; and the night was warm and the room close, and she dreamed bad dreams. Not of the ghosts and devils that so haunted her waking thoughts; not of her second husband, the consumptive Englishman, whose grave lay away beyond the ostrich camps; nor of her first, the young Boer; but only of the sheep's trotters she had eaten for supper that night. She dreamed that one stuck fast in her throat, and she rolled her huge form from side to side, and snorted horribly. In the next room, where the maid had forgotten to close the shutter, the white moonlight fell in a flood, and made it light as day. There were two small beds against the wall. In one lay a yellow-haired child, with a low forehead and a face of freckles; but the loving moonlight hid defects here as elsewhere, and showed only the innocent face of a child in its first sweet sleep. The figure in the companion bed belonged of right to the moonlight, for it was of quite elfin-like beauty. The child had dropped her cover on the floor, and the moonlight looked in at the naked little limbs. Presently she opened her eyes and looked at the moonlight that was bathing her. 'Em!' she called to the sleeper in the other bed; but received no answer. Then she drew the cover from the floor, turned her pillow and, pulling the sheet over her head, went to sleep again. Only in one of the outbuildings that jutted from the waggon-house there was someone who was not asleep. [...]

This is an excerpt from the book 'The Story of an African Farm', by Olive Schreiner

Title: The Story of an African Farm
Author: Olive Schreiner
Series: Penguin Modern Classics
Publisher: The Penguin Group (SA)
Cape Town, South Africa 2007
ISBN  9780143185604 / ISBN 978-0-14-318560-4
Softcover, 13 x 20 cm, 311 pages, several illustrations

Schreiner, Olive im Namibiana-Buchangebot

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