1922 Encyclopædia Britannica/Schreiner, Olive
SCHREINER, OLIVE (c. 1862-1920), pen-name of Mrs.
Cronwright Schreiner, was born in Basutoland, the daughter
of a German missionary sent out by the London missionary

society. She was a sister of W. P. Schreiner, afterwards Prime
Minister of Cape Colony, and married in 1894 Mr. S. C.
Cronwright, also a S. African politician. Early in 1882, when she was
20 years old, she brought to England the MS. of her first novel,
The Story of an African Farm, and submitted it first to George
Meredith, then reader for Chapman & Hall. He praised the
book and suggested certain alterations, most of which she
accepted. Eventually it was published by the firm in 1883, over
the pseudonym “Ralph Iron.” Its success was immediate, but
nothing else that she wrote had quite the same literary quality.
Her later work includes Dreams (1891); Trooper Peter Halkett
of Mashonaland (1897), a much-criticized attack on the first
settlers in Rhodesia; An English South African's View of the
Situation (1899); and Woman and Labour (1911), a fragment of
an earlier MS. which had been burnt with other papers during
the S. African War. She died at Cape Town in Dec. 1920.