Romance and rejection

‘Outsider’ ought to be an important word. To attach it to someone, particularly a writer, is to suggest that their helpless circumstances have condemned them to struggle and neglect. It is up to us — posterity — to look beyond the writers who had social advantages in the year 1880, say, and find those who wrote best.

One group that has been rewardingly elevated in recent years has been women. Although Lyndall Gordon has not tried to unearth anyone very out of the way, she has written about five writers who showed unusual courage and boldness, often behaving unconventionally. The least familiar of her subjects, Olive Schreiner, was an admirable woman, who wanted to be a doctor, and wrote a bestselling and rather scandalous novel of South African life before devoting herself to pro-Republican Boer causes. Others were also independent-minded trailblazers. But were they ‘outsiders’?

In the field of art, ‘outsider’ means something specific.