Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland.
Inscribed to Eleanor Marx
Her Intimate Friend
Schreiner, Olive. Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1897.
8vo.; frontispiece photograph; ads in the front and rear; preliminaries lightly foxed; green cloth, spine stamped in gilt. In a specially made quarter-morocco slipcase.
First edition of Schreiner’s “most excoriating attack on conventional British ethnic assumptions,” a novella following the ethical rehabilitation of an English soldier, who, as a member of Cecil Rhodes's Chartered Company, is engaged in efforts to suppress the Mashonaland rebellion. His moral upbringing in human decency and fair play haunts him in a dream one night while he sleeps in the veld: Christ appears in disguise and through an inquiring dialogue impels Peter to assess the Chartered Company's atrocities, the rape, murder, and looting of native Africans. Peter, guilt-stricken, resolves to redeem himself. The novella climaxes when he cleverly aids an African prisoner of his company to escape, an action which results in Peter's being shot to death. (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 18: Victorian Novelists After 1885, by Joyce Avrech Berkman, 1983. pp. 270-277)
The frontispiece photograph depicts nine white—presumably British—men posing among three lynched black men as they hang by their necks from a tree.
A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper to her most intimate female companion, Eleanor “Tussy” Marx (1855-1898)—Karl Marx’s youngest daughter: Eleanor from Olive. Feb 14/97 19 Russell Rd. London. With the penciled signature of Jean Longuet, Eleanor’s nephew, at the head of the page. Autograph material by Schreiner is scarce: not a single letter has been traced on the market during the past quarter-century, and only four presentation copies.
Feminist theorist Elaine Showalter delineates the Schreiner-Marx relationship as crucial to both women:
Both were idealists caught up in the most radical political and social transformations of the time, living at the frontiers of socialist, feminist, and anti-colonialist struggle. Close friends from the time they first met in 1882, Schreiner and Marx shared a vision of sexual equality, camaraderie, and fidelity between women and men. Marx wrote a purely rationalistic discourse on sex, Schreiner a lyrical and utopian one; but both denied and suppressed women’s anxieties about sexual pleasure, power, and danger that persisted in spite of socialist and scientific rhetoric. Both suffered most of their lives from crippling psychosomatic diseases and nervous symptoms like those of the hysterical women Freud and Breuer were treating in Vienna; Marx eventually committed suicide. Thus, for all their greatness, both were tragic feminist intellectuals of the fin de siècle whose lives revealed the huge gap between socialist-feminist theory and the realities of women’s lives.
In 1885 Marx wrote a letter to Schreiner, whose company she referred to as “mental champagne.” Her biographer Yvonne Kapp characterizes it as “an incontinent love letter,” and hints at the possible nature of their relationship. Certainly, the intensity of their relationship was unique for both of them. Their mutual empathy enabled them to discuss their sexual feelings and to confide in each other a great deal of their private lives; by Schreiner’s own account, Marx was the first woman with whom she could discuss the subject of the emotional hurricane now known as Pre-Menstrual Syndrome. Both women had a lifelong commitment to the woman question and attempted to live by their beliefs; both were involved in unconventional relationships – Marx with Edward Aveling, from 1883, and Schreiner with Havelock Ellis, who described Marx as Schreiner’s “chief friend” when they first met in 1884.
Both women were public figures. Marx, a political activist and writer, co-founded the Socialist League and the monthly Commonweal, to which she contributed several articles and reviews
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