Olive Schreiner Letters Online

Letter Reference	View Humpherys Collection/1
Archive
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	6 February 1898
Address From	The Homestead, Kimberley, Northern Cape
Address To	Legitimation League, 16 John St, Bedford Row, London W.
Who To	George Bedborough
Other Versions

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 George Bedborough, 6 February 1898, Legitimation League Humpherys Collection, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to Professor Anne Humpherys for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter to George Bedborough, which is part of her Legitimation League collection.

1:  ^Private^
2: 
3:  The Homestead
4:  Kimberley
5:  Feb 6 / 98
6: 
7:  Dear Sir,
8: 
9:  I shall be glad to receive the Adult if you are good enough to send it
10:  me. Out & away the best thing in this no. is your paper. Is
11:  S-agittarius a man called Aveling?
12: 
13:  I take it that your view is exactly mine from the remarks in Mr
14:  Northcote’s letter with regard to love & friendship. My only objection
15:  to the exis-ting marriage laws is that they tend to keep people
16:  together who ought to be separated, because they find they are not
17:  bound by friendship & sympathy, which in the highly developed human
18:  creature not only ought but does form the basis from which sex feeling
19:  springs. The assertion of Ruedebus-ch ^unreadable by unreadable^ that
20:  neither man or woman is ever jealous on account of a "pure" &
21:  "spiritual" friendship or love, is so comically opposed to all one
22:  knows of human nature among the most highly developed persons that it
23:  is comical ^ridiculous^: There is no jealousy so fierce & absorbing as
24:  the jealousy of a mother over the affections of her child; & the most
25:  heartrending cases of jealousy I have ever known between man & woman,
26:  have ^been^ where the husband or wife felt that the other was perfectly
27:  faithful but admired & sympathised mentally more with someone else.
28:  And this is inevitable as sex ^emotion^ becomes more mental than pysical
29:  in the most developed persons.
30: 
31:  The letter by Daylight, your own article & the little quotation from
32:  Ed Carpenter, are the only things in this no your paper with which I
33:  find myself at all in sympathy.
34: 
35:  Yours sincerely
36:  Olive Schreiner
37: 
38:  ^Private^
39: 

Notation
The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope. The word ‘Private’ at the beginning and end of the letter has in each case been underlined three times. The particular issue of the Legitimation League’s The Adult that Schreiner is referring to appeared in February 1899 as volume 2, number 1. It includes a thoughtful interesting review of Edward Carpenter's Love's Coming of Age by 'Sagittarius'.