num_pages: 384
description: 'Sybilla considered beauty as all in all. And this child - her child and Angus's, would be a deformity on the face of the earth, a shame to its parents, a dishonour to its race.'First published in 1850, Olive traces its eponymous heroine's progress from her ill-starred birth to maturity as a painter and wife. The crippled child of parents who are disgusted by her physical 'imperfection', a curvature of the spine, Olive struggles to take her place in the world as artist and woman. Published three years after Jane Eyre, Olive's swift fictional response to Charlotte Bronte's novel raises questions of family, race and nation. This edition also includes 'The Half-Caste', a story that confronts questions of miscegenation and racial prejudice in Victorian Britain.
language: English
title: Olive
titlecomplete: Olive
genres: Fiction, English Literature, British Literature, Romance, Classics, Novels, 19th Century, Historical Fiction, Disability, Victorian
ratings_count: 217
publisher: Oxford Univ Pr