Great African Reads discussion

This thread is for discussions of our Jan/Feb 2025 read of The Story of an African Farm, by Olive Schreiner - with NO SPOILERS (there is a thread with spoilers allowed too) - so feel free to discuss book editions, availability, expectations etc. - when you get into the book, please join us in the spoiler thread! 

I bought an early red clothbound edition by Hutchinson and, ehile waiting, I am reading it in a digital version; so far, I am impressed by the cleannes of Shreirer's writing and her cinematic-like descriptive ability. Happy new reading year!

For those of you with a library card in the USA, several ebook editions are available for free on Hoopla - hers is a link to the 2014 edition https://www.hoopladigital.com/title/1...

Sorry, appeared that I put this in the wrong discussion. There are no spoilers here!

Sorry for not chiming in earlier. I first read an original publication of this book at Rhodes University in South Africa, somewhat appropriate considering the location. It's a great book. Schreiner had a very interesting life considering the time and place in which she lived and wrote. I understand that she au paired for a family in one of the southern Cape provinces in the 1870s or 1880s. She was obviously well educated and this would have made her very employable, especially considering the immense, sparsely populated areas outside of the nascent towns. I imagine she drew heavily on her personal experience in writing the books.

So it is interesting that she incorporates various Europeans into the narrative - the Afrikaans tannie (aunt) and her relatives, the unscrupulous Englishman (name?), the pious and honest German and his son, as well as Lyndall, the orphan who seems to embody the character and views of Schreiner herself. I find it even more intriguing considering this story was written at a time of tension between the colonial British government and the various Boer/Afrikaner societies, some of whom had established their own republics in the hinterland. The short-lived first Anglo-Boer war had been waged to the detriment of the British, but the much larger and far more costly and influential second Anglo-Boer War was yet to happen. I think this gives the narrative an extra poignancy.

I was very moved by the book and bought myself a later edition in more recent years. I was intrigued to see if it had retained all the language of the first edition and not surprisingly it didn't. There was some racist speculation on the part of Lyndall considering the fate of the native people which would have been commonplace in Schreiner's time but very politically sensitive today. Otherwise I was largely true to the original and I got to enjoy it all over again.