Elizabeth Weber

Elizabeth Weber (born 18 June 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.

Biography She was born on 18 June 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. 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 ...”.

Waar is die liefde?

Possibly her most acclaimed work, Waar is die liefde? was published in 1950 by APB in their Môrester series. The novel has, as mise-en-scène, the private cabins and decks of a liner en route from Cape Town to England where happenstance and fate all play havoc with a marriage under stress. As a book critic of the now-defunct newspaper, Die Vaderland, wrote, “What the author offers here is presumably the reworking of a trip that she herself had made. It is clear that Elizabeth Weber has a pair of wide-awake, wide-open eyes. She has the ability to rapidly distil and process her observations, and then, in elegant style, to express them. The density of the language, the torrent of delicate and fine observations, the aura of sense, feeling and sentiments, and the angst of self-awareness in her writing are all reminiscent of the style and intent of Marcel Proust in Remembrance of Things Past.