Story of an African Farm, Paperback/Olive Schreiner

Two cousins grow up in the 1860s on a lonely farm in the thirsty mountain veld. Em is fat, sweet and contented, a born housewife; Lyndall, clever, restless, beautiful... and doomed. Their childhood is disrupted by a bombastic Irishman, Bonaparte Blenkins, who gains uncanny influence over the girls' gross, stupid stepmother.