OLIVE SCHREINER'S POETICS OF PLANTS

43pp., colour illus., paperback, Grahamstown, 2019

This essay on how flowers and plants appear in Olive Schreiner's work has been adapted from a talk given at the Schreiner's Karoo Writers' Festival in 2017 and an academic article subsequently prepared for the Journal of Commonwealth Literature.

Foreword by Liz Stanley.

"Best known for campaigning for racial justice, Schreiner is endered here as a prophet for the environment and as an eloquent champion for the notion that human supremacy is antithetical to planetary survival. Dorothy Driver re-introduces us to a woman who (like the Africans on whose land she lived) was deeply attuned to the connections between lives - whether human or plant-based. Driver achieves the rarest of feats - she surprises and delights in a text that is as sublte as it is urgent." Sisonke Msimang, author of Always Another Country

"This fascinating essay...will change the way you look at the world and your place in it." Jacklyn Cock, author of The War Against Ourselves: nature, power and justice and Writing the Ancestral River

Dorothy Driver is a Visiting Research Fellow at Adelaide University, Australia, and Professor Emeritus at the University of Cape Town. She is the author of From Man to Man or Perhaps Only.