Fugard, Sheila

New York. 1985. George Braziller. 1st Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0807611271. 160 pages. hardcover. Jacket design by Jacqueline Schuman. keywords: Literature South Africa Women. FROM THE PUBLISHER - The year is 1920. Christina Ransome, an Englishwoman, teaches at a Coloured school in the Karoo, a semi-desert region in South Africa whose harsh landscape reflects the intransigent racial attitudes of its Boer community. A follower of Gandhi during his years in South Africa, she has withdrawn there after the death of her Indian lover and Gandhi's return to his native land. Haunted by her political past, and by her dead lover's betrayal in taking a child bride, she becomes involved in an intense and complex relationship with a Coloured boy she now tutors and tries to protect. It is his seduction of a retarded Boer girl, and its consequences for the community, which moves this sympathetic and poetic novel to its climax. Though set in the past, A Revolutionary Woman touches on the most urgent of our contemporary concerns - the nature of racial tension, the power of sexual entanglements, the attractions of violence and pacifism and, finally, the limits of freedom. inventory #205 ISBN: 0807611271.