Summary With the celebration in 2008 of the 125th anniversary of the first publication of Olive Schreiner's novel, The Story of an African Farm, in 1873, the question of reliability of the text came up once again for review. This article accounts for the circumstances of the first printing in London with an inexperienced author as proofreader, without any existing standardisation or other lexical references to non-British usages particularly proto-Afrikaans, to consult, and the prevailing London publishing norms in control. Subsequent editions with numerous corrections by her hand, as well as by later editors, are mentioned, while the quest to establish a definitive edition is outlined, now that English South African usages incorporate many fringe language examples which have since become nativised into common usage. The article suggests that lax proofreading, on the one hand, together with scantily informed metropolitan standards of language outreach, on the other, have led to unfortunate errors being perpetuated, even in numerous scholarly spin-offs, despite the attempts of previous scholars to standardise the text to conform to present-day professional norms and conventions.