“Writer’s block” in Olive Schreiner’s From Man to Man or Perhaps Only

A new edition in 2015 by Dorothy Driver of the unfinished novel, From Man to Man or Perhaps Only –, and the accessibility of Liz Stanley’s Olive Schreiner Letters Online (OSLO) have made it possible to speculate on reasons for Olive Schreiner’s apparent “writer’s block” in not completing the novel t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:	English in Africa 2020-08, Vol.47 (2), p.79-97
Main Author:	Dowling, Finuala
Format:	Article
Language:	eng
Subjects:	Access Allegory Anxieties Anxiety Authorship Baking Equality Fate Fixation Heroism & heroes Letters Literary characters Literary devices Literary influences Literature Logic Men Misogyny Morality Narrative techniques Novels Plot (Narrative) Publishing Publishing industry Readers Schreiner, Olive (1855-1920) Sex industry South African literature Unfinished works Women Writers
Online Access:	Get full text
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Summary:	A new edition in 2015 by Dorothy Driver of the unfinished novel, From Man to Man or Perhaps Only –, and the accessibility of Liz Stanley’s Olive Schreiner Letters Online (OSLO) have made it possible to speculate on reasons for Olive Schreiner’s apparent “writer’s block” in not completing the novel that she felt so passionately about and worked on intermittently for forty-seven years. I argue that Schreiner’s progress was impeded by several factors: her fixation on a rare flash of “illumination” which produced the novel’s exquisite Prelude; her conflating of the ending of the novel with her own end; her commitment to “baking bread” for her country; and her inclusion, near the end of the novel as it now stands, of a scene in which two characters express the agony and anxiety associated with publication. Keywords: Olive Schreiner, From Man to Man, writer’s block
ISSN:	0376-8902 2071-7474