Pauline Smith South African writer Pauline Smith is remembered for works of realistic fiction chronicling life among Afrikaner settlers in the western cape region of South Africa. Her best-known volume, the short story collection The Little Karoowas praised by the South African novelist Alan Paton in the New York Herald Tribune Book Review in as “one of the most remarkable collections of Afrikaner stories ever written. Her parents had immigrated to South Africa from England during the s in hopes of relieving symptoms of ill health that plagued Herbert Smith.
He was the first trained doctor to settle in the area and he traveled widely to treat his patients. Smith accompanied her father, learning a great deal about the landscape and the people who farmed, herded goats, or raised ostrich in the fertile region.
The Dutch-speaking Afrikaners, also known as Boers, were descendants of Dutch colonists term paper writing were the first European settlers in the area. They subscribed to a strict essay on the sisters by pauline smith of Christian doctrine and valued hard work.
Their society was characterized by racial prejudice and gender inequality: Smith and her sister, Dorothy, enjoyed a Curriculum vitae de gerente de finanzas though isolated childhood and were educated at home untilwhen they were sent to school in Scotland. In a letter recalling this period and quoted by biographer Sheila Roberts in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Smith wrote: During this period she began to write.
She later noted in the essay “Why and How I Became an Author,” which first appeared in the journal English Studies in Africa, that luissupertramp.000webhostapp.com hoped through her stories “to set down for [her] own comfort the memories of … happier days. In she returned to Oudtshoorn for a visit and recorded her impressions of the region in what became known as her ” Diary. While vacationing in Switzerland in Smith met the English novelist Arnold Bennettand he took an interest in her writing.
Rather than flatter her with praise, Bennett offered honest assessments of weaknesses and strengths in her work and identified the unique value of her writings about Afrikaner life. Of this encounter she wrote in “Why and How I Became alaskadrugrehab.net Author,” “The ‘damning’ of my novel brought me an astonishing essay on the sisters by pauline smith of relief, and established my faith in the critic’s judgment as no essay on the sisters by pauline smith would have done.
These stories and others, including “The Sinners,” essay on eminem’s life Miller,” and “Ludovitje,” essay on the sisters by pauline smith later collected in the volume The Little Karoo, which initially drew attention for documenting a passing era in a little-known colonial region.
In the story, an elderly couple—tenant farmers whose rustic, isolated existence has consisted of working relentlessly for their simplest needs—are thrust into the world of modern medicine in a regional hospital and cannot endure the pain of being separated by the regulations of the institution.
Commenting on “The Pain,” a contemporary review in the Cape Times, reprinted in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, shashitaruncom.000webhostapp.com “No lovelier tale of old age has ever been written, and it reveals at once the chief secret of the writer’s power.
She has a rare gift of insight. In “The Miller,” the title character waits too long to offer a gesture of tenderness to the wife he has treated cruelly, dying in her arms unable to articulate his essay on the sisters by pauline smith and repentance.
In “The Schoolmaster,” the teacher’s stifled emotion, stemming from his desire for a female student, Engela, erupts during a drive with his pupils, when he wildly assaults the cart mules that will not cross a order an essay and gouges out their eyes.
He leaves and later is found drowned in the same stream. In his blind desire to acquire water rights from his neighbor, Burgert de Jager offers his daughter Marta to Jan Redlinghuis, who owns the land de Jager wants.
Marta’s sister, Sukey, is rebuked by Redlinghuis when she offers herself in essay on the sisters by pauline smith of her delicate sister. Eventually, Marta is humiliated by Redlinghuis who treats her as property, and she dies, with Sukey left trying to comprehend the situation in terms of the Christian meaning of sin and redemption.
In addition to the poignancy of its subjects and themes, the collection has been praised for rendering in English the rhythms and speech patterns of Afrikaans, but, with the exception of “Ludovitje,” it fails to treat the important subject of race relations.
In that story, a young boy who is not highly valued by members of his own family has a deep spiritual impact on the African laborers who serve as grave-diggers in the area.
One worker abidmushtaq.000webhostapp.com so moved by the boy’s spirituality that when the boy dies the worker converts to Christianity and offers to prepare a special grave for the child. He is rewarded by the boy’s family with a place to stay and the promise of favorable treatment. Reviewing the essay on the sisters by pauline smith in the Saturday Review of Literature, critic Brooks Shepard wrote that Smith “has succeeded overwhelmingly in breathing life into the Karoo, with its remote farms and hamlets, its laborious journeyings in a rumbling ox cart, its stern, sober, simple, shrewd men and women, its utter detachment from the world and civilization … ; but she has succeeded also in picturing the man and woman in each of us, so that the people and the country of which she writes with strange brooding pity seem only incidental to her brooding upon mankind.
Set in the late 19th Century, the story centers on Andrina, an Afrikaner teenager who is the illegitimate child of a woman now dead and Aalst Vlokman, a minor church official, who has never admitted his paternity. Raised by her mother’s sisters, Andrina is seduced by a science proofreading her predicament, Vlokman gains the courage to publicly admit that he is her father and to go in search of her.
Ultimately, the birth of Andrina’s own illegitimate child brings reconciliation with her father. Because of its essay on the sisters by pauline smith within a pious, isolated community, “The Beadle” is often compared with Nathaniel Hawthorne ‘s The Scarlet Letter. George Dale, writing in Crux, asserted that the novel “ranks a high place in any company, for its theme is universally valid and the characterization convincing.
Pauline Smith
It will always be rediscovered with astonishment and admiration. Later considered interesting primarily for their autobiographical elements, the stories offer character sketches and scenic descriptions in a essay on the sisters by pauline smith language heavily influenced by Smith’s early reading of the Old Testament.
Critic Sheila Scholten commented in the book Pauline Smith, edited by Dorothy Driver, that the ballads “although not literary … are delightfully evocative,” and she concluded that Georgia state college essay the poems as well as the stories of Platkops … Smith has achieved an authentic picture of life in a small Karoo town at the turn of the essay on the sisters by pauline smith.
They depict South African life with a truth and a beauty which no writer has so far achieved in the short story form written in Afrikaans. A revival of Smith’s works coincided with the centenary of her birth inand after that various editions and collections were published with regularity.
Her minor writings appeared in such volumes as The Unknown Pauline Smith: The South African Journal of Pauline Smitha result of continuing academic interest in Smith’s body of work.
The Sisters By Pauline Smith
Books Driver, Dorothy, ed. South African Writers, Gale Group, Twentieth-Century Literary Bendigo bank business plan Vol. Periodicals English Studies in Africa, September Publishers Weekly, August 10,
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