FROM MAN TO MAN OR PERHAPS ONLY -

524pp., paperback, Oxford University Press, Oxford, (1926) 2025

ISBN: 9780192883056

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Dorothy Driver

This novel by Olive Schreiner, rewritten over many years, unfinished at the time of her death and posthumously published in 1926, tells the story of two white women born into the racist society of mid-nineteenth-century South Africa. One sister remains in the British Cape Colony and finds a way to deal with her husband's infidelities. The other, raped at age 15 and hounded out of her insular white South African community, becomes a kept woman in London's East End.

Addressing the ill-effects of a male-dominated imperial capitalism, and positing an equivalence between marriage and prostitution in a society where women's function is primarily sexual, the novel foregrounds the perspective of a young black girl, placing before readers the vision of what Schreiner called an "expanded and enlarged humanity".

Based partly on manuscript amendments by Schreiner, this edition reproduces two alternative endings, one apparently told to her husband-editor and summarised by him, the other written in a letter to a friend. Driver's introduction and expansive notes provide literary, historical, and linguistic context. This edition also includes extracts from Schreiner's letters and journals that cast light on the genesis, composition, and final abandonment of the novel.

"We inhabit a national and international present in which Schreiner's deep and nuanced thinking on gender relations, colonial capitalism, and social change remains extremely pertinent...[This] is without a doubt one of the most significant works of the South African literary heritage." Professor Meg Samuelson, Department of English, University of Cape Town

Dorothy Driver is Adjunct Professor at Adelaide University, Australia. Until 2005 she held a professorship in the English Department at the University of Cape Town, where she is now Emeritus Professor.