This chapter explicates the ways in which setting matters in Coetzee’s writing. The settings assembled in its mises en scène are vital to narrative world-making; at the same time, they perform an indexical function that invests these narratives with ‘worldly weight’, thus establishing a relation to the real that is simultaneously fictitious and true. Tracking a movement from the insular and segregated state of apartheid South Africa, through the provincial-metropolitan axis and along the southern latitudes in Foe, Boyhood, Youth, and Slow Man, the chapter shows how these settings indicate a sustained and deepening sense of situatedness that is both informed by and larger than the national contexts of South Africa and Australia. Chafing against the national frame, the settings of these works elaborate the category of the provincial and then redirect it to that of ‘the South’. They function as neither tromp l’oeil nor exotic local colour, neither blank screen nor empty frame, but instead convey the substance of the ‘real South’ while locating it as alternative centre of gravity that generates its own deictic markers.

An extraordinary epistolary exchange, criss-crossing the Indian Ocean in the late 1920s and early 1930s and animated by the circulation of literary texts forms the focus of this exploration into textual circuits and intimate relations in the late imperial world. My dramatis personae—Marie Kathleen Jeffreys, V. S. Srinivasa Sastri and P. Kodanda Rao—played remarkable roles in the theatres of empire, decolonisation and nation building during this charged era, while in the process briefly producing a community across the Indian Ocean. The prophetic comment made by Rao to Jeffreys in a letter of August 1930 dispatched from London, where he and Sastri were attending a round-table conference on Indian independence, invites the inquiry I undertake here; it shifts this epistolary exchange from the private domain to the public, authorising the trespass into the intimate and affective sphere that this study performs, and eliciting readings that approach the political via the personal.

Employed at the Archives in Cape Town, Jeffreys expended much of her life tracing the texture of her city in literary, sociological and historical accounts. I have argued elsewhere for the past and present significance of these writings that conceptualise the Cape as a creole crucible in an oceanic crossroads at the tip of Africa (see Distiller & Samuelson 2005; Samuelson 2007; 2011).

Women's writing spans the periods, concerns, genres, languages and media addressed in this collection. The purpose of this chapter is not so much to provide a detailed overview of women's writing in South Africa – an impossible task within the space constraints – as to sketch out landmark publications, attending to the emergence of the female autograph and the ways in which women write women within and/or against feminist and national discourses, while exploring the following questions: Through what devices, tropes and reconstructed genealogies have women writers laid claim to artistry, authorship and textual authority? How do they represent the category of ‘women’ and inscribe national identity within a fractured, divided and heterogeneous polity? What representational strategies do they develop to unpick the ‘patchwork quilt of patriarchies’ (Bozzoli, ‘Marxism’, pp. 149, 155) in South Africa?

The female autograph and the nation: Schreiner and Mgqwetho

Situated on opposite sides of the colonial divide, taking up different generic approaches and grappling with divergent concerns, Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) and Nontsizi Mgqwetho (published during the 1920s; date of birth and death unknown) enter into print culture an emergent national and feminist consciousness, while negotiating female authorship. The fate of their respective oeuvres is indicative of the differential challenges women have faced in coming into and remaining in print in South Africa. Schreiner's first novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), was an immediate success and has achieved canonical status, yet it was first published under a male pseudonym (Ralph Iron).