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Driver, Dorothy (editor) : Pauline Smith

(Johannesburg: McGraw-Hill, 1983) 0074506595

ISBN 0074506595

Southern African Literature Series, No. 3. 220 x 150 mm; pictorial wrappers; pp. (viii) + 235, incl. index; monochrome illustrations. Cover slightly foxed, and sunned on spine; spotting to edges; scattered underlining and discreet annotations, largely in pencil, but with a little pen. Good condition. "Few writers have won so high a reputation on so small a corpus as Pauline Smith. Remembered, among other things, for her penetrating treatment of a class of rural Afrikaners, for her fine evocations of Little Karoo settings and for her skilful blending of an Afrikaans and a Biblical flavour in her style, she has always had a place in South African literary circles and her reputation in the academic world has been steadily increasing. Yet she is only now beginning to get the kind and degree of attention that she deserves. ... Smith's small output by no means suggests that she did not take herself seriously as a writer. Even before she met Arnold Bennett in 1908, a meeting which she describes as having properly started her literary career, she had written sketches and stories drawing on her South African childhood and her Scottish adolescence, had started a novel, engaged the services of a literary agent, and, on her first return visit to South Africa from England, as a young woman of twenty-three, had kept a diary that reveals a writer's interest in detail and anecdote."