Elizabeth Weber

Elizabeth Weber (born June 18, 1923) is the pen-name of Elizabeth Marais (née Elizabeth Olivier). She flourished during a short, intense period of high-quality literary production in Afrikaans between the years 1949 and 1952 (see Bibliography below), after which, apart from translations of children’s literature from English into Afrikaans, and nursery stories in Afrikaans published sometime thereafter, she disappeared from public view.She was born on June 18, 1923 in Germiston, a small city on the East Rand, to the east of Johannesburg. She matriculated in 1939 from the local English high school, and thereafter took the BA degree at the University of the Witwatersrand with Afrikaans, English and Classics as majors. After a year at a teachers’ training college, she taught Afrikaans until the end of 1947, when she left to work in radio-broadcasting at the Afrikaans Language section of the BBC in London. After a three-year stay abroad, she returned to Johannesburg to an office job with a publisher and book distribution organization, probably the now defunct APB (Afrikaans Pers-Boekhandel) whose headquarters were at 769 Joubert Street in Johannesburg, South Africa. Significantly, the author published her entire oeuvre through APB. She then returned to teaching, after which nothing more is recorded of her work or whereabouts.She was married to Mr. Sarel Marais, and had two sons of that union. She also had one brother, the Reverend Phil Olivier of Cape Town, who was also an author, and a younger sister who dedicated her life to musicShe received honourable mention from the scions of Afrikaans literary critique, Nienaber, Senekal, and Bothma, who, writing in the early 1950s, stated, “... amongst the many writers (especially authoresses) in the field of complex love relationships, Elizabeth Weber, with her understanding of how complex relationships develop, and her gift for being able to express ‘the relative’ in human relations, has produced substantive literary material ...”.

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