Smith, Pauline (Janet) (1882–1959)

South African writer. Her novel The Beadle (1926) is considered a classic of South African literature, and like many of her short stories, focuses on the lives of rural Afrikaners. She was encouraged by the English novelist Arnold Bennett, who wrote a highly complimentary introduction to her fictional debut The Little Karoo (1925).

Smith was born in the Karoo, in what is now the Western Cape province, South Africa, and lived there until sent to boarding school in Britain in 1895. Her fiction is based on childhood recollections of the Karoo combined with the impressions she recorded in diaries while on return visits to South Africa in 1905 and 1913. Her early writings were published as Platkops Children in 1935.