Olive Schreiner

"From Publishers Weekly : Originally published in 1980 and long out of print, this fine work illuminates Schreiner's life and major writings through a portrayal of her "conscious struggles for self-definition" as a novelist, feminist and political activist. Born in 1855 to English missionaries working in Africa, hers was a lonely, self-educated childhood. She worked as a governess during the late 1870s, and when she sailed to England for medical training in 1881, had with her the manuscripts of three novels, including The Story of an African Farm, her best known. She was quickly taken up by London's intellectual circles; Havelock Ellis and Eleanor Marx were among her closest friends. On her return to Africa, Schreiner supported the Boer cause and took what she herself called an "almost painfully intense interest" in empire-builder Cecil Rhodes, although she quickly became disillusioned with both. Abhorring treatment of blacks as an "engine of labour," she became an outspoken advocate for black citizenship; and her Women and Labour published in 1911 reflected a lifetime of thought on "the Woman Question" and became a crucial work for early-20th-century feminists. The authors write insightfully of the split sense of self in a woman who made such an impact yet felt her life a failure. South African political activist First was assassinated in 1982; Scott is a British book editor.."--amazon.com.

Rip Van Winkle / Washington Irving [Young Goodman Brown]( / Nathaniel Hawthorne [Fall of the House of Usher]( / Edgar Allan Poe The lightning-rod man / Herman Melville The diamond lens / Fitzjames O'Brien The celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County / Mark Twain The outcasts of Poker Flat / Bret Harte [Damned Thing]( / Ambrose Bierce The turn of the screw / Henry James The Hiltons' holiday / Sarah Orne Jewett The gift of the Magi / O. Henry The moving finger / Edith Wharton The open boat / Stephen Crane Lou, the prophet / Willa Cather The men of Forty Mile / Jack London Babylon revisited / F. Scott Fitzgerald [A rose for Emily]( William Faulkner Big two-hearted river / Ernest Hemingway Flight / John Steinbeck

Little Jannita sat alone beside a milk-bush. Before her and behind her stretched the plain, covered with red sand and thorny karoo bushes; and here and there a milk-bush, looking like a bundle of pale green rods tied together. Not a tree was to be seen anywhere, except on the banks of the river, and that was far away, and the sun beat on her head. Round her fed the Angora goats she was herding; pretty things, especially the little ones, with white silky curls that touched the ground.

The mummy / Ambrose Bierce -- The thing on the doorstep / H.P. Lovecraft -- Some words with a mummy / Edgar Allan Poe -- In a far-off world / Olive Schreiner -- The thing at Ghent / Honoré de Balzac -- The monkey's paw / W.W. Jacobs -- The open window / Saki -- A day-dream / Fitz-James O'Brien -- Keesh, son of Keesh / Jack London -- Professor Jonkin's cannibal plant / Howard R. Garis -- The beast of Averoigne / Clark Ashton Smith -- Selina Sedilia / Bret Harte.

"[The book] features over 300 of Olive Schreiner's key letters on South African people, politics and its racial order."--Dust jacket.