Olive Schreiner's various writings, both fictional and non-fictional, made an extraordinary contribution to late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century feminism, and continue to be of interest today. She is best known for her first published novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), which was received with great acclaim, and Woman and Labour (1911), which became known as the Bible of the Women's Movement. The Story of an African Farm had advanced views on, among other things, the shaping of women, which — in a jibe at finishing schools and girls’ education in general — Schreiner had identified as a process of ‘finishing’ women: ‘our end has been quite completed’ (185, 189). Although, in most instances, later critics have been disappointed by the novel's closure, seeing the deaths of the two main characters, Lyndall and Waldo, as a kind of moral failure and even as a failure in Schreiner's composition, it is The Story of an African Farm that has kept Schreiner's reputation as a novelist in place.

However, From Man to Man is, to my mind, the more interesting text: more mature, more ambitious, and more intent upon struggling through the social problems and contradictions of the time, and — if it is also exemplary of those ‘large loose baggy monsters’ identified by Henry James (84) — it is nevertheless characterised by magnificent, impassioned writing, evocative descriptions of its various settings and an acute portrayal of a range of (particularly) women's subjectivities.