The Beadle by Pauline Smith

193 Pages, Paperback

20cm x 13cm (B-Format)

Goodreads Rating: 3.42 * 57 ratings * 10 reviews

Genres: Classics/South Africa

Among all the novels describing life in South Africa, "The Beadle" is certainly the most poetic. The style perfectly suits the theme, and nowhere has the character of the Platteland Afrikaner been drawn with greater love and understanding. The main theme is neither the love of innocent Andrina du Toit for the irresponsible young Englishman who recuperates among the Boers of the Aangenaam Valley, nor the old tragedy of the fathers' sins visited on their it is the simplicity of the lonely life in an isolated Boer community. Despite the subtle touches which set it so charmingly in period and place, "The Beadle" transcends time and place, for it deals with almost classical simplicity and grandeur, with the eternal human problems of guilt and remorse, of love and sorrow. Pauline Smith grew up in Oudtshoorn. As a child she used to accompany her father, a doctor, on slow drives by Cape cart to farms where patients lay sick or dying. It must have been on these drives that she gained the deep and lasting impressions of the veld and of the stark Karroo mountains. Pauline Smith's work has been acclaimed by great writers and critics such as Arnold Bennett and William PIomer. It has as great an appeal to popular taste as to the most fastidious. Professor Raymond Sands makes the following '. . . I think it has not yet been established, but I alsp think Aat it perhaps ought to be,that it is the best of the South African novels in English . . . of itself complete, a finished work of art." The dust-jacket by Katrine Harries, showing Andrina's rebellious Sacrament dress drying on a thorn bush's the theme of the novel and its dramatic climax.