Heather Parker Lewis

Who would have thought I’d ever read – let alone enjoy – a biography of Olive Schreiner? It was only the name Heather Parker Lewis, that grammatically idiosyncratic but wonderfully gifted writer, which induced me even to try it.
Merely opening the book involved a leap of faith based on the excellence of her previous work: her novel The Interloper [also featuring Schriener] is well worth reading as is The Numbers Gangs, a fascinating study of prison gangs.
You know those illustrated books which contain pop-ups, pull-outs, flaps, envelopes and all manner of delightful surprises? Windows can be opened, books with-in the book perused, and the contents of envelopes examined – enabling the reader to delve below the mere surface of the picture.
Parker Lewis’s ‘informal biography’ is exactly like that, with a wealth of tiny tidbits of information, intriguing, irrelevant little facts, and small snippets that come together magically like a complex jigsaw to present a view of Schreiner’s life that is so immediate one feels one lived it with her.
Olive was the ninth of 12 children [of whom seven survived] born to Gottlob and poor Rebecca Schreiner: she was born in 1855 and despite enjoying chronic ill health – asthma, TB, heart disease – lived to the relatively ripe old age of 65, dying only in 1920.
Her father was a German missionary and in uniting himself with Rebecca Lyndall, daughter of a strict non-conformist puritanical minister, he was marrying above his station and condemning his family to a life of harsh but ‘respectable’ poverty. Small wonder Olive was vehemently anti-religious and took a cut in her salary as a governess rather than instruct her charges in the Scriptures.
After an unhappy childhood marred by an uneasy relationship with her mother, the 15-year-old Olive was an unrepentantly agnostic blue-stocking who alienated most of her relations and was passed around her older siblings and family friends like an unwanted present and, somehow, generally leaving rumours of scandal in her wake.
With an unusual [for a woman of her day] interest in medicine and the natural sciences Olive determined to become a doctor and worked as a governess to earn the necessary funds: from 1868 to 1881 she lived and worked all over the Eastern Cape and it was then she wrote The Story of an African Farm, Undine, and From Man to Man.
She moved to England in 1881, returning to the Cape only eight years later, in what heralded one of the most exciting and disappointing periods of her life: her health suffered in the dank, polluted air and she had to relinquish any idea of medical training, dependent on her family for financial support.
She started to smoke cigarettes, on doctor’s advice, a vice almost unheard of amongst women of her class, and fell disastrously in love. But she also, at long last and under a male pseudonym, published The Story of an African Farm, which was greeted with critical acclaim and earned her many influential friends.
It’s not the mere recitation of Olive’s life that enchants however, even when events are made personal by extensive quotations from her writings: what gives this biography its magical immediacy is Parker Lewis’s prolific use of sidebars, her lists, maps, time lines, discursions, diversions and appendices.
We are presented with the contents of Olive’s sewing basket, a psychological analysis of her relationship with her mother, a psychiatric assessment of her personality as a young woman, a peak into her pantry, a look at her recipes and even a voyeuristic examination of the intimate contents of her trunk.
If the devil is in the details, by the end of the book we know everything there is to know about what bedeviled Schreiner – her medicine chest, full of morphine, strychnine and opium is a revelation – but we also know her so intimately and on such a fundamental level that we understand what drove her.
For the reader to understand the subject must surely be the ultimate aim of any biography and Heather Parker Lewis succeeds admirably in this regard with a delicate thoroughness which is a sheer delight to read.… (altro)

Jacana, David Phillips and Jonathan Ball are obviously sleeping on the job if books like this have to rely on unknown brands like the Ihilihili Press for publication: a mere hint of self-publication casts a stain across any title, yet The Interloper is one of the best and most versatile South African literary novels I have read.

Unsuccessful writer Heather dies before her time and, while in Limbo, is invited to join a writers circle comprising Charlotte and Anne Bronte, Katherine Mansfield, and Olive Schriener: with their help she is determined to complete the her magnum opus.

Inspired to write a ‘factional’ work on her family history, Heather is guided not only by her four female mentors but also by a supernatural entity she calls The Interloper who makes it possible for her to examine her family’s past and her own youth as well.

Family trees, genealogical notes and oral histories form much of the book; over the years there have been embellishments and romanticizations but Heather has taken pains to discover the plain, unvarnished truth about her forebears.

This truth is interspersed with excellent literary pastiches of writers as diverse as Jane Austen and Lawrence Durrell, Salmon Rushdie and James Joyce, while her daily life in Limbo is described with subtle nods to musical poets like Leonard Cohen.

Firmly rooted in Cape Town, beloved mistress and hated backdrop to this family history, where the atheistic Heather attempts to understand the motivations behind the actions of her devoutly Catholic Irish ancestors, the story challenges many of our preconceptions regarding ‘the mother city’.

Despite the whimsical notion of Limbo, the author’s somewhat misinformed ideas about modern Catholic belief, the fantastical initial premise, and the incredibly irritating spelling and grammatical errors [we are warned that in Limbo there is no punctuation but not that the other rules of English are likewise ignored], The Interloper is a wonderful book.

History, politics, society and religion all have an essential part in this beautifully written work of faction that both enhances and debunks the ideal of Cape Town as the caring cultural capital, and the role the English played in enhancing its liberal European status.… (altro)