Two Versions of a White African Girlhood: The Grass Is Singing and Children of Violence

Abstract

Thus, the narrator of the third volume in Children of Violence describes Olive Schreiner’s influence on the intellectual life of Mrs Van der Blyt, a courageous and admired Afrikaner liberal. Schreiner’s influence can also be traced in the intellectual life of Doris Lessing who in her ‘Afterword to The Story of an African Farm’ writes:

I read the novel when I was fourteen or so; understanding very well the isolation described in it; responding to her sense of Africa the magnificent — mine, and everyone’s who knows Africa; realising that this was one of the few rare books. For it is in that small number of novels, with Moby Dick, Jude the Obscure, Wuthering Heights, perhaps one or two others, which is on a frontier of the human mind. Also, this was the first ‘real’ book I’d met with that had Africa for a setting. Here was the substance of truth, and not from England or Russia or France or America, necessitating all kinds of mental translations, switches, correspondences, but reflecting what I knew and could see. And the book became part of me, as the few rare books do.

(SPV, pp. 98–9)

During the voyage over, the girl had read The Story of a South African Farm and this had begun an intellectual revolution in her.

(RS, p. 202)