n English in Africa - Space and the body in Pauline Smith's "The Pastor's Daughter"

Abstract

Arnold Bennett, friend and mentor to Pauline Smith, made this complaint about her early writing: "you take for granted throughout a complete knowledge on the part of the reader of the conditions of life in the place and time of which you are writing [...]. Damn it, you don't even give it a point on the earth's surface. Who is to guess that it is in South Africa, even?" (cited by Ravenscroft 1983, 44-45). In his Introduction to The Little Karoo, too, Bennett is moved to offer an explanatory comment on the setting of her fiction.