Olive Schreiner was born on 24 March 1855 in the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Her German father, Gottlob Schreiner, was an evangelical Lutheran, who completed his missionary training in London in the 1830s and there met and married Rebecca Lyndall, the daughter of an English Nonconformist minister. Shortly after their marriage they departed England for missionary work in South Africa. Olive was the ninth of 12 children, five of whom died in infancy; she was named Olive Emilie Albertina after three dead brothers. Her early years were spent on a series of mission stations until, in 1865, her devout but incompetent father fell foul of the Wesleyan ministry's strict regulations against trading and was forced to leave, resulting in

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First published 30 June 2002

Citation: Burdett, Carolyn. "Olive Schreiner". The Literary Encyclopedia. 30 June 2002.
[http://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5070, accessed 9 February 2010.]