Olive Schreiner Letters Online

Letter Reference	HRC/RichardGarnett/Recip/OS-RichardGarnett/8
Archive	Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	5 January 1889
Address From	Hotel du Pavillon, Mentone, France
Address To	Richard Garnett, British Museum, London, England
Who To	Richard Garnett
Other Versions	Rive 1987: 146

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 Richard Garnett, 5 January 1889, 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. The date of this letter is derived from the postmark on an attached envelope, which also provides the address it was sent to.

1:  Hotel du Pavillon
2:  Mentone
3: 
4:  Dear Dr Garnett,
5: 
6:  What do I think of you tales? I think they are delicious I don’t
7:  think many people will understand; there’s a delicious rare old
8:  flavour about them, that people whose taste has been spoiled by crude
9:  new wines won’t be able to catch. Your son’s book shows power, &
10:  it shows a grasping after things which he has not yet reached to,
11:  which is perfectly hopeful. Nothing is so terrible as those very
12:  finished-up young writers.
13: 
14:  Thank you much for sending them me. Thank you for what you said about
15:  my work. No, you are quite mistaken about my work I never or seldom
16:  re-touch anything. I write down at a dash a thing as it comes in my
17:  minds. If I don’t find it perfect (to my ideas & according to my
18:  powers) I burn it. Sometimes I write a thing entirely over again. As a
19:  rule I don’t even re-read any thing till I see it in proof. Then I
20:  make corrections. I think however a great deal before I write.
21:  Sometimes I carry a thing about with me for years, before I set a word
22:  down. For the last 8 years I have been doing s-cientific work almost
23:  exclusively. But it will all come back to me in the shape of art at last.
24:  I write all this because you have shown such a friendly sympathy in
25:  my work.
26: 
27:  Yours always faithfully,
28:  Olive Schreiner
29: 
30:  ^I shall be here till May, when I hope to return to England, for a
31:  short time^
32: 

Notation
The 'scientific work almost exclusively' which Schreiner refers to concerns 'the woman question' and she had been working on her planned 'Introduction' to Mary Wollstonecraft's (1792) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (London: J. Johnson) and also the manuscript of From Man to Man. The tales referred to are Richard Garnett (1888) The Twilight of the Gods and Other Tales London: T. Fisher Unwin; and his son's book is Edward Garnett (1888) The Paradox Club London: T. Fisher Unwin.