Olive Schreiner Letters Online

Letter Reference	HRC/CAT/OS/5b-v
Archive	Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	Saturday 11 March 1916
Address From	Alexi, 31 The Park, Hampstead, London
Address To	Rose Cottage, Carbis Water, Cornwall
Who To	Havelock Ellis
Other Versions	Draznin 1992: 501-2

The manuscript of this letter by Olive Schreiner belongs to the Archive referenced above; its ownership of the original should be acknowledged by referencing the letter as indicated: Copyright transcription: © Olive Schreiner Letters Project. This transcription can be freely used as long as copyright is acknowledged and it is referenced using the following citation: ‘Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, 11 March 1916, Harry Ransom Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin, for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. Dating this letter has followed an associated (unattached) envelope and its postmark, which also provides the address it was sent to.

1:  Alexi
2:  31 The Park
3:  Hampstead
4:  Saturday
5: 
6:  Dear old Havelock
7: 
8:  I do wish you & Edith could let or sell your house at Carbis Water If
9:  you’ll write me out a bit of paper what its like & the terms I might
10:  try among my friends I might just hear of some one who would like a
11:  nice quiet little place in Cornwall. So many people want to be out of
12:  London now on account of the Zeps. I fear the real big raid is still
13:  to come; but I can’t understand people being so frightened & rushing
14:  away. I am staying here in the Countess Batthyanys house. The perfect
15:  quiet & solitude here is delightful. You can’t feel lonely when you
16:  are quite alone. – its people make you lonely. An over-wrought high
17:  tensioned person like poor Alice Corthorn does break one down. I am
18:  trying to write I’ve unreadable written a little thing on
19:  con-scription which is coming out in the Labour Leader. Do you see it
20:  regularly.
21: 
22:  Oh the peace here is so delightful I don’t feel I want to see anyone
23:  or go any where just absolute quiet & that I have here. I’ve not
24:  been into town for two weeks, but am going tomorrow to lunch with Lady
25:  Low. She and the Countess Batthyany are now the two closest friends I
26:  have in London except my beloved faithful Adela Smith. I think the
27:  Batthyany’s are very hard up because of course they can’t get any
28:  money from the continent. (Private, don’t mention this.) Every one
29:  seems hard up. You see all the papers going for me like “old
30:  boots” about my little article on conscription soon!
31: 
32:  I do hope Edith is better: but the weather here has been so awful
33:  every one I know almost has been ill here, influenza of a very bad
34:  kind, that won’t go away, seems everywhere. All my brother’s
35:  family have had it. I never knew such cold & damp together in England.
36:  If you go out you feel as if you were perfectly naked & the wind
37:  cutting through you, & the dark sky & wet earth are pretty depressing.
38:  Every one says they’ve never known such cold in London. Of course
39:  its much colder up here than in London itself & much damper, but the
40:  quiet & rest makes up for everything.
41: 
42:  Good bye dear, I hope you are feeling better.
43:  Yours ever
44:  Olive
45: 

Notation
For the 'little thing on conscription', see "To Our Anti-Militarists, By Olive Schreiner" Labour Leader 16 March 1916, p.6. Draznin's (1992) version of this letter is in some respects different from our transcription.