From Man to Man or Perhaps Only—

Summary

Olive Schreiner's From Man to Man or Perhaps Only―, unfinished at the time of her death and posthumously published in 1926, tells the story of two white women born into the racist society of mid-nineteenth-century South Africa. One sister remains in the British Cape Colony and finds a way to deal with her husband's infidelities. The other, raped at age fifteen, is hounded out of her insular white South African community, and becomes a kept woman in London's East End. Addressing the ill-effects of a male-dominated imperial capitalism, and positing an equivalence between marriage and prostitution in a society where women's function is primarily sexual, the novel foregrounds the perspective of a young black girl in order to place before its readers the vision of what Schreiner called an "expanded and enlarged humanity."

Edited by Dorothy Driver, and based partly on manuscript amendments by Schreiner, this edition reproduces two alternative endings, one apparently told to her husband-editor, and summarized by him, and the other she wrote in a letter to a friend. Driver also provides literary, historical, and linguistic context with an in-depth introduction. This edition includes extracts from Schreiner's letters and journals that cast light on the genesis, composition, and final abandonment of the novel.