Between “the lights and shadows”: Reading the new edition of Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man or Perhaps Only —

“Perhaps only God knew what the lights & shadows were” — thus reads the epigraph to Olive Schreiner’s unfinished and posthumously published novel, From Man to Man or Perhaps Only — (1926). In the novel’s prelude, the protagonist, Rebekah, sits as a child by herself at night pondering the movements of a candle’s shadow:

She moved her hand and watched the shadow move. If only one were grown up, one would know all about these things! She dropped her hand on her side. Perhaps, even grown-up people didn’t know all. — Perhaps only God knew what lights and shadows were! (Schreiner, 2015/1926: 35–36)

In just a few lines, Schreiner manages to point towards several of the novel’s topics: a thirst for knowledge; the divide between science and religion; experimentation and how Rebekah can use herself and her own body to understand the world; the divide between the child and the adult, and, implicitly, between (masculine) authority and (feminine) subservience. The lights and shadows, produced by the candle, continue to play a symbolic role throughout the rest of the prelude. The candle casts a light on the mother and her baby, Bertie, when Rebekah enters her mother’s bedroom in the next scene, and it leaves Rebekah and “Baby-Bertie” in the shadows in the final sentences of the prelude: “Along the floor the night light shone, casting deep shadows into far corners, especially that in which the two children lay! | But they were all sleeping well” (2015/1926: 42). ¹ Taken together, the use of light and shadows, the invocation of science and God, of sisterly love, and a divide between adult and child, point to the novel’s preoccupation with the need to understand one’s surroundings, oneself, and the world; and the importance of looking beyond common hierarchies to reach these understandings. Schreiner’s husband, Samuel Cron Cronwright-Schreiner, who collated and edited Schreiner’s manuscripts after her death to compile the first edition of the novel, reflects on the ambivalence expressed in two words from the epigraph, “perhaps only”, which is also the novel’s secondary title:

As apparently her last choice [of title], one might well expect it to be the most suitable, expressing with rare art, by the use of those two words taken from the wondering and deep-piercing mind of the child, a kind of stunned reluctance to judge the meaning (if there be a meaning) and the incomprehensibility of the “ethic” (if there be an ethic) in the awful and mysterious living cosmos. (Cronwright-Schreiner, 1926: lvii)

As Cronwright-Schreiner highlights, these words turn the focus away from definitive answers and simplistic understandings and towards the ambivalence that the novel displays.

We use this evocative sentence, “Perhaps only God knew what the lights & shadows were”, as a springboard for this written symposium. With a history of mixed fortunes in publication and reception, From Man to Man has found its place, at various intervals, in both the light and in the shadows. This symposium takes the recent republication of From Man to Man as an opportunity to consider the novel’s motley history, the complexity inherent in its tackling of contentious contemporary issues, and the various ways that critics have responded and continue to respond to this intriguing text.

In Schreiner’s own words, From Man to Man follows “the lives of two women, one very intellectual & complex [Rebekah], the other very simple & unintellectual [Bertie], but both equally beloved: it’s just the story of all they thought & did & felt, & how it ended with them both” (qtd. in Driver, 2015d: 457). Throughout this story of “all they thought & did & felt”, From Man to Man tackles the impact of racial relations and their inscription in the domestic space, interrogates sexual relations and prostitution, and attempts to dismantle eugenicist and social-Darwinist thought. Schreiner herself considered From Man to Man her seminal text: she called it her life’s work and the “best explanation of [her] views” (qtd. in Driver, 2015d: 451). Through these concerns and others, the novel speaks directly to our current moment as colonial and imperialist legacies continue to plague postcolonial societies and South Africa in particular. Despite Schreiner’s self-professed conviction of the novel’s worth, and its relevance for society then and now, the treatment of the novel after Schreiner’s death has been mixed — from the disservice done to it by various republications, its dissonant critical reception, and its eclipse by Schreiner’s first published novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883).

Despite From Man to Man’s evident import, The Story of an African Farm has been Schreiner’s lasting legacy. Easily accessible in several cheap editions (such as Penguin, Dover Thrift, and AD Donker), as an ebook, and in scholarly editions (such as Oxford University Press), and translated into several languages, the latter novel remains a popular fixture on many school curricula, the focus of widespread scholarly attention and, in general, Schreiner’s most widely read work. From Man to Man, in contrast, has attracted much more modest levels of attention, despite it being the text where Schreiner’s ideas come more fully into fruition. From it first seeing the light in 1926 with T. Fisher Unwin in London, it has only been republished by a handful of publishers, mainly in the United Kingdom and in the United States. The last edition was produced in 1982 by Virago Press, and the novel has been out of print since the mid-1990s. In South Africa, it has only ever been published as part of a compendium volume, Karoo Moon (2004), which also included The Story of an African Farm and Schreiner’s other posthumously published novel Undine (1972/1928) (Driver, 2015b: x).

Dorothy Driver’s new edition of From Man to Man (University of Cape Town Press, 2015 and Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming) thus heralds a vital moment in Schreiner scholarship by bringing the novel back into print and providing, for the first time, a stand-alone version of From Man to Man in South Africa. It goes much further than a simple reprint, though, on account of the paratextual information Driver provides and the vital editorial changes she makes to the text. Driver goes back to the 1911 typescript and, in doing so, is able to present a variety of editorial improvements to shed light on and remedy the shortcomings of previous editions. These include “silently correct[ing] obvious errors” and modernizing “most of the spelling”, while also retaining many of Schreiner’s “punctuation idiosyncrasies” and the words that demonstrate her “creative forging of South Africa English” (Driver, 2015c: xlviii).

Driver also unearths information not included in Cronwright-Schreiner’s edition, such as the moniker “Clartje” for one of the characters who is unnamed in previous editions, provides helpful contextual information and editorial clarifications in footnotes, and brings together the novel’s two known draft endings so that they can be read side by side, thus affording them equal status and furthering alternative readings of the text. Further, Driver has produced a wide-ranging introduction to the text that situates the novel within Schreiner’s life and times, observes its mixed critical reception, and suggests future avenues for critical engagement.

Driver carefully documents her editing process of From Man to Man, both in a “Note on the Text” (2015c) in the edition and in her article, “On Producing a New Edition of From Man to Man, or Perhaps Only—” (2015a), which further aids readers in understanding how the novel’s patchy publication history has led to errors in transcription and unmotivated editorial choices. In the past, Schreiner scholars have had to struggle with the fact that Schreiner’s husband exercised considerable editorial control on the unfinished text and that he destroyed much of the material used during this process. While Driver notes that not all changes made by Cronwright-Schreiner were questionable, she explains that some of his changes were certainly “made unnecessarily or erroneously, and on his own initiative” (2015c: xlix). Having attended to such errors and unmotivated decisions and having consulted the 1911 typescript herself, the new edition provides scholars with access to a more objective account of the text and a form of it that is “closer to [Schreiner’s] original aims” (Driver, 2015b: x).

Diver also calls attention to the importance of Schreiner’s letters in contextualizing and reading From Man to Man through her provision of Appendix 2. This appendix, titled “Genesis and Composition of the Novel”, contains extracts from Schreiner’s journals and letters that demonstrate “Schreiner’s at times anguished, at times exhilarated work on the novel, as well as some of the reading and thinking that fed into its composition” (Driver, 2015d: 429). The appendix contributes to a growing body of Schreiner scholarship, heralded largely by the online accessibility of the Olive Schreiner Online Letters Project, which recognizes the immense value of Schreiner’s epistolary archive in understanding her wider oeuvre (see, for example, the extensive work of Helen Dampier, Andrea Salter, and Liz Stanley, well exemplified in their co-written article “Olive Schreiner, epistolary practices and microhistories” (Stanley et al., 2013)).

As with its publication history, From Man to Man has lived in the shadow of The Story of an African Farm (2008/1883) critically, the latter being generally well-studied and well-liked, while the scholarly attention to From Man to Man has, in the past, been mixed. As Driver notes in her comprehensive introduction to the new edition, reactions to the novel have ranged from “favourable” (for example, Cherry Clayton, Joyce Berkman, Liz Stanley, Anthony Voss, and Gerald Monsman) to those who have accorded the novel “short shrift” (such as J. M. Coetzee and Karel Schoeman) (2015b: xiii). Ruth First and Ann Scott, in their seminal biography on Schreiner, critique the novel for its “almost unbearable sentimentality” (1980: 129); they also call it “melodramatic and derivative” and a symbol for “everything that was unfinished in Olive’s life” (1980: 172). Similarly, Dan Jacobson (2005), in his introduction to the Penguin Edition of The Story of an African Farm, commented that “it is impossible to read From Man to Man without feeling a sense of talents wasted in a way that appears to have been helpless and yet deliberate too” (2005: 16). He called the novel a “spectacle”, and a “wreckage of a potentially first-class work” (2005: 16).

Many scholars have, however, recognized the special contributions of From Man to Man to Schreiner’s work overall and to its contemporary literary environment. Carolyn Burdett, for one, viewed the novel as being of paramount significance to understanding Schreiner’s oeuvre, dedicating an entire chapter to From Man to Man in her book, Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism (2001). Anthony Voss called it “a more earnest, even more progressive work” (1991: 137) than The Story of an African Farm. Anne McClintock viewed From Man to Man in an especially positive light, deeming it “a radical rebuttal of the presiding tenets of late Victorian and colonial society” in her book, Imperial Leather (1995: 284), while Cherry Clayton called it “the first novel to show the particular memories and sufferings of a South African in exile, a banishment compounded by womanhood, bound within a patriarchy that is coextensive in colony and metropolis” (1997: 72).

As can be garnered from this brief representation of different critical responses, the novel has been viewed from a range of perspectives which can often read confusingly and contradictorily. The ambivalence that characterizes the critical reception of From Man to Man, also appears in the response to Schreiner’s oeuvre more generally. In her book, Imperialism, Labour and the New Woman, Liz Stanley (2002) aptly titled her chapter on interpretations of Schreiner’s work: “Will the real Olive Schreiner please stand up?”. All at once, Schreiner inhabits critical space as a socialist, a radical, a failure, a cosmopolitan thinker, a racist, an advocate for social justice, a Marxist, a colonial feminist, a freethinker, and the list continues. While Stanley notes that the “coexistence” of these interpretations discloses “more about the disagreements between political analytical viewpoints than about Schreiner and her writing” (2002: 108), this might also point towards the evident complexity of Schreiner’s thought and her political positions. As Angelo Fick expresses it in this symposium, Schreiner’s writings — and From Man to Man in particular — are of import as they “may help resist the flattening out of South African cultural history” and rather, present a “complex history of discursively figured and variously contested and contestatory engagements” (qtd. in Nivesjö and Barends, 2021: 53).

From Man to Man is slowly but surely garnering increased critical interest; coming out into the light, so to speak. There are bright spots of scholarship on From Man to Man from the last five years. Simon Lewis (2014), for example, has read From Man to Man in light of Schreiner’s engagement with W. E. B. Du Bois’s iconic The Souls of Black Folk (1903), while Lucy Graham (2017) has brought the novel into dialogue with Lauretta Ngcobo’s And They Didn’t Die (1990). Of the contributors to the interview within this symposium, Jade Munslow Ong (2018) has read From Man to Man from the unique perspective of African modernism, while Valerie Stevens (2018) has analysed human–animal relations and the politics of touch in the novel.

The fact that the novel is unfinished has perhaps hindered some scholarship and the publication history has almost certainly done so. It, naturally, remains an unfinished text, and even Driver’s editorial improvements need to be taken provisionally (as she herself notes). There might also be issues with accessing the new edition as it is, so far, only published in South Africa (although an Edinburgh University Press edition is forthcoming), and for a local audience it carries a rather steep price; the sheer size of it seems to also be a barrier for readership. Nevertheless, this written symposium provides a place for a focused attempt at attention to the novel and is, hopefully, only the starting point for future endeavours to explore this text.

The articles in this symposium present new directions in scholarship on From Man to Man or take up fresh perspectives on old issues. Together they show the relevance of From Man to Man for a reader today, and the challenges offered by the novel’s new edition. Liz Stanley (2021) opens the symposium with an article wherein she returns to earlier manuscript fragments of From Man to Man. In turning to the archives, she, together with the work Driver has performed in assembling the new edition, demonstrates the untapped potential for Schreiner scholarship in revisiting Schreiner’s original writings that have survived. This is an avenue that has been little pursued by scholars in relation to From Man to Man, as Driver makes clear in relation to her research for preparing the new edition: “Readers may be surprised to hear that Cronwright-Schreiner preserved at least some of the original material in his possession relating to From Man to Man, for no Schreiner critics have hitherto acknowledged its existence” (2015a: 28).

Analysing the 1886–1887 manuscript fragments as avant-textes (i.e., tracing the development of a published text and interrogating the stability of it through analysing its “pre-texts”), Stanley casts light on Schreiner’s writing and editing processes, a “writing-and-editing” process as she calls it, where a “stitching” together of different thought processes changing from one manuscript version to another plays an important role. She also highlights how Schreiner is concerned with producing a novel “in advance of the then-prevailing conventions of the genre” (2021: 25). In this regard, Stanley advances the scholarship of early Schreiner critics, such as C. P. Ravilious who, in his quest to ascertain which manuscripts Schreiner first submitted to Chapman and Hall in 1881, traced Schreiner’s writing processes. However, Ravilious notes that his article “[was] not the place to follow in detail Olive Schreiner’s prolonged struggle to make of her novel ‘something better than it was’” (1977: 8), a task which Stanley’s article successfully performs, furthering our understanding of how Schreiner thought about and worked on From Man to Man.

Most interesting, however, is the light Stanley’s work sheds on how Schreiner developed her characters and plot, which offers further insight into theme, based on the changes, sometimes small and subtle, that Schreiner wrought between different scripts. For example, Stanley’s analysis shows the deliberate decisions taken by Schreiner around controversial issues such as the racialization of Clartje and sheds light on her employment of Rebekah’s character in relation to the use of moralization.

Joyce Avrech Berkman’s (2021) article examines the dynamics of possession in From Man to Man. Although From Man to Man has been read through New Woman ideas of marriage as prostitution and possession before (see, for example, Anna Snaith’s analysis of From Man to Man in Modernist Voyages (2004: 47–53) and Berkman’s monograph, The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner (1989)), Berkman’s article demonstrates how race and gender inflect acts of possession. ² She explores how white colonial women could be both possessed and possessors, as well as the ways that Schreiner’s politics of possession open up, and limit, black female characters’ agency. Berkman’s argument culminates in an examination of the novel’s two endings. In this culmination, Berkman points to a certain level of stability in Schreiner’s vision with From Man to Man, as, although there are substantial differences between the two endings and their meanings for the issue of possession, she sees them as both depicting an end where “sisterhood” is impossible. Berkman goes on to complicate the endings’ inherent pessimism with Schreiner’s general, more optimistic, “outlook” elsewhere and, in so doing, situates her reading of From Man to Man within Schreiner’s broader oeuvre.

The twin issues of gender and race are, for the most part, contentious in relation to Schreiner’s writings. Paula Krebs illustrates this when she points out that critics have either applauded Schreiner for “her progressivism in not being as bad as everybody else” in writing black African characters, or scolded her for “letting her feminism distract her from the real struggles of South Africa” (1999: 110; emphasis in original). However, with the new edition of From Man to Man, the Schreiner reader has, as Lucy Graham terms it, “an edition assembled from a contemporary feminist perspective” (2017: 90). A change such as that we now “know […] Schreiner at some point wanted to give a name to the black woman [Clartje] […], though this name does not appear in the edition assembled by her husband” (Graham, 2017: 90), can open up alternative readings of the novel in relation to race and gender.

In an interview article with the purpose of discussing From Man to Man in our current context, interviewees explore such contending views of race and gender (Nivesjö and Barends, 2021). Jade Munslow Ong analyses race in the realm of domestic relations, and, drawing on precisely Driver’s inclusion of Clartje’s name, suggests that Schreiner’s complex depiction of Clartje, the “coloured servant girl”, is an attempt to “[instigate] the dissolution of unequal power relations” (qtd. in Nivesjö and Barends, 2021: 54) in the domestic sphere. Connected to Munslow Ong’s focus on the intersectionality of race and gender in the novel, Valerie Stevens relates the novel’s portrayal of these issues to current debates of being an “ally”. She sees Schreiner as creating “ally-ships” between characters of different genders and racializations and across generations. Like Berkman, she also relates the character of Rebekah to Schreiner and her larger oeuvre: “Rebekah, like Schreiner herself, [is] […] a flawed but ambitious ally, striving to improve her own thinking and for gender, class, and racial equality” (Stevens, qtd. in Nivesjö and Barends, 2021: 46). Angelo Fick, too, focuses on the novel’s treatment of gender and race, but provides a critical reading of it and its relevance in a so-called postcolonial age. Fick argues that while the novel presents a utopian vision of “equality between men and women, as between ‘races’ in a distant future” (qtd. in Nivesjö and Barends, 2021: 50), and a complex colonial female subject position, Schreiner does not succeed in extending the same imagination to her black characters, which are ultimately not portrayed as full human subjects. Like Berkman, Fick touches on possession in the novel through arguing that Schreiner addresses gendered rights to property, but fails to imagine what role the black person plays as property in the narrative. Despite these shortcomings, Fick sees a value in From Man to Man finding a current audience to ensure that South Africa’s heterogenous present is understood through its history, although he warns against reading the novel’s treatment of race as progressive in relation to today’s perspective.

More generally, the interview article provides a forum for a diverse range of perspectives to emerge. Stevens examines the novel’s construction of alternative intimacies, beyond those of failed heterosexual relations, and thus provides a much needed critical reading of relationships in the novel. Related to this, she examines human–animal relations in From Man to Man, relating Schreiner’s treatment of animals to her broader “social vision about the treatment of women” (Stevens, qtd. in Nivesjö and Barends, 2021: 47). Stevens’s response constructively overlaps with Munslow Ong’s in that both note, in different ways, “the political implications of Schreiner’s interest in animals and the environment” (Munslow Ong, qtd. in Nivesjö and Barends, 2021: 58). To this end, both Munslow Ong and Stevens point out how the further botanical information which Driver provides in footnotes works to situate the novel firmly within its South African context (Stevens), inviting readings that take “expressions of indigeneity” (Munslow Ong) into account. Together, these readings demonstrate a convergence of views, which highlights the value of ecocriticism in reading From Man to Man.

Munslow Ong’s call for further attention to Schreiner’s ecological world is directly picked up by Dorothy Driver (2021) in the final article. Expanding on the botanical information and analyses provided in the new edition, Driver carefully examines indigenous plant life as a formal writing strategy in Schreiner’s fictional work. Driver’s analysis adds depth to the observations made by Fick, Munslow Ong, Stevens, and Berkman of the many varied ways that nature becomes important for the novel’s theme, characters, and plot. It also speaks to Fick’s analysis of the novel’s treatment of the landscape and its link to indigenous peoples. Fick places From Man to Man in a continuum of J. M. Coetzee’s (1988) notion of how “white writing” in South Africa has projected love onto a landscape empty of indigenous populations, and although Fick notes that Schreiner breaks with this trope in that she “insist[s] on the presence of Black people in that landscape” (qtd. in Nivesjö and Barends, 2021: 51), Driver’s attention to the indigeneity and, indeed, agency of plant life in From Man to Man adds another perspective to this question. While Driver is careful not to equate indigenous plants with indigenous peoples, she reads Schreiner’s use of indigeneity in the novel more broadly as a means of interrogating “the white South African position on African soil”, as well as a means “to open up the imagination into a future that whites would not themselves manage to create” (Driver, 2021: 75).

One aim of this symposium is, as its title suggests, to bring this novel out of the proverbial “shadows” and into the “light” of Schreiner criticism, South African literature, Victorian literature, and (post)colonial literature. Nevertheless, the fact remains that From Man to Man, as a novel, is incomplete and plagued by deficiencies in several areas: its lack of developed black characters, its lack of a fixed ending, and its lack of editorial and aesthetic refinement. However, as the responses in this symposium propose, a focus on the novel merely in terms of what it lacks detracts from the significant work the novel does. Instead of obsessing over “imperfections”, Driver’s edition of From Man to Man offers critics an opportunity to comment on the self-reflexivity of the novel, to view, as Stanley and Driver have done, the text as “writing-in-process”, and to encourage its continual rethinking and reworking of various ideas. Such reading practices unpack, as Angelo Fick suggests, the “layeredness” and complexity of colonial South Africa and resist flattening out characters (and, we might add, the novel itself) in binary terms of “victims” or “victimizers”/perfect or imperfect.

In line with the above, we hope that this symposium illustrates the complexities of From Man to Man and invites scholars to revisit the novel in the current moment. In the past few years, divisiveness and bigotry have increased significantly on a global scale. Racial nationalisms have continued to sweep through the US, Europe, and the Middle East and, in South Africa, any belief in a “rainbow nation” has effectively been shattered by ongoing social and economic inequalities. Within this context, From Man to Man is of value to any reader interested in interrogating the processes of inequality, prejudice, and injustice that structured Schreiner’s milieu and continue to plague society today.

For Schreiner scholars in particular, From Man to Man is a vital text in that it represents the maturation of her thought in fictional form — importantly, a maturation that does not signify fulfilment, but rather an elevated state of contestation, conflict, revision, and flux, as her many manuscripts attest. The readings presented here reflect this state: they are by no means illustrative of all the critical views the novel invites, but rather a sample of the various possible avenues for future engagement. This is part of the excitement of rereading From Man to Man: like any literary work, multiple interpretations are possible. However, this novel — and Driver’s edition in particular — actively invites engagement and robust debate for, as it states in its subtitle, “Perhaps only God knew what the lights & shadows were”.