Set in South Africa in the early twentieth century, Sheila Fugard’s A Revolutionary Woman follows Christina, an English teacher whose political idealism begins to collide with the realities of race, gender, class and colonial life.

Drawn toward Gandhi’s ideas of non-violence and social transformation, she teaches across the racial divisions imposed around her, while becoming increasingly conscious of how difficult it is to separate private conviction from the structures one lives inside.

Christina wants politics to provide moral clarity, but the people around her keep refusing to become examples. The novel moves between intimate consciousness and the wider pressures of segregation, nationalism and revolution, asking what happens when an abstract commitment to justice meets people whose lives cannot be neatly arranged around it. Short, psychologically close and politically uneasy rather than consoling.

Virago Press, London, 1984. First Virago edition; first published in South Africa by A.D. Donker in 1983. Paperback. Light shelf wear and minor rubbing to covers; pages lightly toned, otherwise clean; binding firm. Very good condition.