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Freitag, 29. März 2019

Olive Schreiner: Charlotte Brontë of South Africa, 19th-Century Celebrity / Lyndall Gordon. In: Lit Hub March 29, 2019

In a bare room, a woman prods memory with her pen. The shutters are closed against the sun and by night against the voices of the guards under her window. It was “so dark that even the physical act of writing was difficult.” Future readers will know how she has to “crush down indignation” if she is to write.
Constrained under martial law, she means to remake a book that took many years and now has been burnt by troops looting her home in Johannesburg. Report has reached her that the manuscript cannot be salvaged: the first half burnt away; the rest charred—the pages crumbled when touched. For nine months she has put it from her mind, but isolated as she is now in March 1901, regrets for her lost work stir. What memory can retrieve for a short book—she will call it Woman and Labour—can occupy this time of confinement and darkness by night when the law forbids a candle and even to strike a match. A resolve firms to rescue her challenge to authority from the ashes.
Twenty years ago she’d sat alone in another room with miles of veld stretching to the horizon. There too, filled with purpose, her pen had traveled over the page as she finished her novel The Story of an African Farm. She’d carried it to London and, pressing her manuscript under her waterproof, trod from one London publisher to another. Chapman & Hall, who had turned down another of her novels, accepted the African Farm on the advice of their reader, the novelist George Meredith. The publisher of Dickens, Thackeray and Anthony Trollope, they paid this unknown colonial only 18 pounds, in contrast with the hundreds of pounds that George Henry Lewes had secured for each of the Scenes by the unknown George Eliot.
Chapman & Hall’s sole editorial suggestion was that the heroine marry her seducer, otherwise “Smith’s, the railway booksellers, would not put it on their stalls.” ... [mehr] https://lithub.com/olive-schreiner-charlotte-bronte%CC%88-of-south-africa-19th-century-celebrity/

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