Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism explores two key areas: first, the debates taking place in England during the last two decades of the nineteenth century about the position of women, and, second, the volatile events of the 1890s in South Africa, which culminated in war between the British Empire and the Boer republics in 1899. Through a detailed reading of the fictional and non-fictional writing of one extraordinary woman, Olive Schreiner, it traces the complex relations between gender and empire in a modernizing world.