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/
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen