The feminist theme so uncongenial to Holmes’s taste had been presented with passionate sympathy two years earlier in Olive Schreiner’s _Story of an African Farm_. This novel is reminiscent of _Mary, a Fiction_, both in its championship of women and its naïvely autobiographical pattern. The similarity is due, however, only to the authors’ comparable life circumstances and not to any possible influence, for by 1880 when Schreiner was writing, Wollstonecraft’s volume was rare even in England, and Schreiner had not then left the Transvaal. She brought her manuscript to London in 1882 and it was published in 1883. _The Story of an African Farm_ is a sensitive girl’s outcry against the masculine violence and brutality of a frontier society, and its heroine is obviously a self-portrait of the author. Lyndall (Schreiner _mère’s_ maiden name) has been turned against men by the villainy or contemptible weakness of the only specimens of the sex in her lonely milieu, and equally turned against passion in women by her coarse and callous aunt’s susceptibility to it. Snared later by her own emotions, she revolts against her lover’s domination, refuses marriage, bears his child secretly and alone, and falls fatally ill in consequence. An effeminate boy, long in love with her, traces her to her hiding place, disguises himself as a woman, and without revealing his identity nurses her until her death. All her life, at least on the conscious level, Lyndall has sought “something nobler, stronger than I, before which I can kneel down.” Religion, the obvious answer to her need, has been spoiled for her by the pitiable weakness of the one man she has known who professed it. Her lover is stronger than she but signally lacking in the nobility she craves. Her only help, and subconsciously her only real love, is her own fearless strength. At one point she is reduced to crying: “Why am I so alone, so hard, so cold? Will nothing free me from myself?” But on two other occasions, notably the deathbed scene where she communes with her own image in a mirror,[16] her naïve and passionate narcissism reveals itself so clearly and is so lovingly transcribed as to betray it as the author’s own. (One cannot help wondering whether Barrès had read the _African Farm_ before writing his preface to _Monsieur Vénus_ in 1885.) Schreiner’s heroine is drawn to no individual woman save herself, but she is an impassioned champion of the whole female sex as well as a hater-of-men. The novel is filled with revolt against the subjugation of women and their limited opportunities for individual development.