As this year marks the 125th anniversary of the first publication of Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883), it is appropriate to commemorate this event. What I propose to do is to give a brief summary of what I conceive to be its importance for South Africa, and then to proceed to some perennial problems the text raises in order to offer some solutions. I am currently engaged in preparing a freshly edited, new edition of The Story of an African Farm for the South African Penguin Modern Classics series, so that I am in a position to report back on some of these dilemmas from a professional insider's point of view. I mean to discuss the backroom business of text production, a topic almost entirely neglected by those who depend on definitive editions for their critiquing. You will remember that the young Schreiner gave up governessing in the Eastern Cape and took the first draft of The Story of an African Farm to the United Kingdom personally in order to arrange for its publication. After nearly two years of rejections by various British publishers, and several cuttings and reworkings, following the guidelines specified by more than one reader, she eventually managed to place it. Apparently this was on the recommendation of another novelist, George Meredith, by then well enough established, yet still having to skivvy it with extra payments for his opinions. Meredith was German-educated, so that there may have been a special affinity between him and her. Certainly he would have understood the subtleties in her presentation of old Otto, the father-figure character and foreman on the farm, a portrait which everyone assumes is based on her own recently deceased father, the Swabian missionary, who had brought his very English wife, Rebecca Lyndall, out to South Africa forty-five years before.
