The Story of an African Farm

Content Warning: This section mentions death, infant death, and suicide.

Orphaned Lyndall, cousin to Em, is one of the novel’s two primary protagonists. She does not fully belong to farm life and longs to leave home and experience the world. While Em loves her and Waldo harbors a crush on her, Tant’ Sannie only tolerates her. However, Tant’ Sannie’s attempts to “correct” her unconventional behavior are met with little success—so much so that Tant’ Sannie strikes Em rather than Lyndall for any indiscretion, fearing Lyndall’s ferocity.

Lyndall is a serious child turned radical adult. She knows her own mind better than those around her and is supremely self-possessed: “She never made a mistake” (41), the narrator notes, though Lyndall is only 12 at this time of this observation. Lyndall also resists the unjust exercise of power from the time she is a small child, vowing to protect those weaker than her, as when she releases Waldo from imprisonment in the barn. When she returns from school, she enlightens Waldo with her newfound philosophies of life—particularly regarding the inequalities between men and women—thus intellectually liberating him as well. In contrast to Em, Lyndall wants independence and seeks knowledge, but Em intuits that these desires will be her downfall when she dreams about Lyndall’s dead child and Lyndall’s subsequent fate.