The Story of an African Farm was first published in 1883, under the pseudonym Ralph Iron. Only later did it transpire that the author was actually a woman - Olive Schreiner.

Among the numerous plaudits bestowed on this pioneer novel is that of Es'kia Mphahlele in 1960, when he found the issues Schreiner raised in it 'too generous to fit into the South African pattern of values', while Doris Lessing in her 1968 afterword considered it to be 'one of those few rare books, on a frontier of the human mind'. As Dan Jacobson remarked in his 1971 introduction: 'Nothing can take from her the honour of being the first to make usable the country and the people within it as a subject for fiction.'

Olive Schreiner (1855 1920), South African author and feminist, and friend of Havelock Ellis and Eleanor Marx, was one of the most important and challenging social commentators of her time. The ninth of twelve children, she lacked formal education and was taught by her mother. It was her 1883 novel Story of an African Farm that secured her reputation as an author and feminist, which her activities in England (1881 9) further consolidated. First published in 1911, this acclaimed feminist work, one of the most influential of the early twentieth century, established Schreiner's place in the Women's Movement. A reworking of an earlier manuscript destroyed during looting of her Johannesburg home by British soldiers, it considers how the role and position of women has been determined by the artificial constrictions of society. Schreiner ends the work with her vision of true equality between man and woman. This is the 1914 printing.

This is a trilogy of Olive Schreiner's farm novels, Undine, The Story of an African Farm and From Man to Man.

The author was pitch-forked into prominence by the publication in 1883 of The Story of an African Farm, originally published under the pseudonym 'Ralph Iron'. The other two novels were published posthumously. Undine was in fact completed before The Story of an African Farm, and many consider From Man to Man, the book she cherished most, to be her best novel.

Karoo Moon is classic Africana by South Africa's first internationally recognised author; and each of the novels has strongly autobiographical elements, helping the reader to understand a remarkable woman who went on to become an outspoken anti-colonial, pro-Boer campaigner during the Anglo-Boer War, South Africa's first feminist, and a prescient supporter of her disfranchised fellow citizens.