South African Women’s Writing

Abstract

This chapter concentrates on women’s writing from South Africa, looking initially at the historical and political context in which women have written since the beginning of the century. It briefly considers writing by Olive Schreiner, the first South African woman writer to really achieve prominence, and the foremother of contemporary South African women’s writing, looking briefly at The Story of an African Farm (1883), then moving on to the mid-twentiethcentury work of Doris Lessing. Most of the chapter will concentrate on Black South African women’s writing, with particular interest in Bessie Head and Zoe Wicomb, both bi-racial Black South Africans who, among many others of their generations, left the country in order to write about it. During and post-Apartheid, other writers have also published, such as Miriam Tlali, and the Afrikaner writer Ingrid de Kok. Many women write about living in exile and explore sufferings and isolation caused by sexism and racism, either reporting these in factually based stories (Miriam Tlali) or in semi-fictionalised autobiographical writing (Bessie Head and Zoe Wicomb).