The most beautiful book to come out of South Africa, at least that is known to me, is Pauline Smith’s The Little Karoo. It was published in 1925, when the racial question (as it was then called) concerned the relations of Boer to Briton. The blacks in those days were considered to have mere walk-on parts in the drama of history.
Pauline Smith was a timid soul who became a protégée of Arnold Bennett. Self-advertisement had not yet become the greatest literary virtue, and her collection of eight tragic stories about the inhabitants of the Little Karoo, a sparsely populated arid area of Cape Province inhabited by simple Boers with Old Testament ways, was widely praised. The emotions of her characters were, of course, all the deeper for not being openly expressed.
She herself grew up in the Little Karoo, where her father was a (or perhaps I should say the) doctor.
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