Book excerpt: 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.