“Writer’s block” in Olive Schreiner’s <I>From Man to Man or Perhaps Only –</I>

Abstract

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