Dreams: Three Works Dreams, Dream Life and Real Life, Stories, Dreams and Allegories (Late Victorian and Early Modernist Women Writers)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A DREAM OF WILD BEES. MOTHER sat alone at an open window. Through it came the voices of the children as they played under the acacia-trees, and the breath of the hot afternoon air. In and out of the room flew the bees, the wild bees, with their legs yellow with pollen, going to and from the acacia-trees, droning all the while. She sat on a low chair before the table and darned. She took her work from the great basket that stood before her on the table: some lay on her knee and half covered the book thatrested there. She watched the needle go in and out; and the dreary hum of the bees and the noise of the children's voices became a confused murmur in her ears, as she worked slowly and more slowly. Then the bees, the long-legged wasp-like fellows who make no honey, flew closer and closer to her head, droning. Then she grew more and more drowsy, and she laid her hand, with the stocking over it, on the edge of the table, and leaned her head upon it. And the voices of the children outside grew more and more dreamy, came now far, now near; then she did not hear them, but she felt under her heart where the ninth child lay. Bent forward and sleeping there, with the bees flying about her head, she had a weird brain- picture ; she thought the bees lengthened and lengthened themselves out and became human creatures and moved roundand round her. Then one came to her softly, saying, " Let me lay my hand upon thy side where the child sleeps. If I shall touch him he shall be as I." She asked, " Who are you ? " And he said, " I am Health. Whom I touch will have always the red blood dancing in his veins ; he will not know weariness nor pain; life will be a long laugh to him." " No," said another, " let me touch ; for I am Wealth. If I touch him material care shall not feed on him. He s... This volume brings together for the first time the entire range of the shorter pieces of imaginative writing that she continued to produce throughout her life, together with her final account of the vision informing her life's work. It rescues Schreiner from the charge of having exhausted a slim talent in one semi autobiographical novel and provides a context in which to situate a woman writer whose idealist concerns recognised no simple geographical boundaries. To picture her as first and foremost a colonial writer or, alternatively, primarily as a member of the finde-siecle British avant garde, does little justice to the links she made in her own writing and to the complex situation she occupied, for Olive Emilie Albertina Schreiner's life (1855-1920) straddled two centuries and two continents, while her travels between the land of her birth, South Africa, and her family's European homeland embroiled her in the political ferment of two wars: the Boer War (1899-1902) and the first World War (1914-1918). Olive (Emilia Albertina) Schreiner, Mrs. Cronwright (also wrote as: Ralph Iron) (1855-1920) was a South African author, pacifist and political activist. In 1867 she moved to Cradock with her older brother. When her brother left Cradock, Olive chose to become a governess. She accepted posts as a governess at a number of farms, most notably the Fouchés who provided inspiration for certain aspects of The Story of an African Farm (1883), published under the pseudonym Ralph Iron, as well as a small collection of stories and allegories called Dream Life and Real Life: A Little African Story (1893) By Olive Schreiner ; Edited By Elisabeth Jay. Includes Bibliographical References.