Negotiating Power: Olive Schreiner and Racial Exclusion in New Woman Fiction

Abstract

This article examines the contentious relationship between New Woman literature and the British empire. Olive Schreiner’s novella, Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), and The Story of an African Farm (1883) demonstrate how New Women writers adopted exclusionary imperialist ideologies in order to promote their agenda of female emancipation in fin-de-siècle Britain.