Olive Schreiner Letters Online

Letter Reference	Lytton 01229/6
Archive	Lytton Family Papers, Knebworth
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	28 July 1893
Address From	66 Marina, St Leonards, East Sussex
Address To
Who To	Constance Lytton
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 Constance Lytton, 28 July 1893, Lytton Family Papers, Knebworth, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the Knebworth House Archive (www.knebworthhouse.com) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter to Lady Constance Lytton, which is part of the Knebworth collections.

1:  66 Marina
2:  St Leonards-on-Sea
3:  July 28 / 93
4: 
5:  Thank you so much for giving that picture to Alice Corthorn. I value
6:  so much every thing that brings beauty & fresh tenderness into her
7:  life. She has to fight life so single handed. They say there’s a very
8:  good description of her in a novel about women medical students which
9:  has just been written; have you seen it?
10: 
11:  I hope it is resting you very much to be in the country. I spent one
12:  day in London, & it seemed to take away all the life from one in a few
13:  hours. I am beginning to feel more & more the terrible-ness of men
14:  herding together in those great cityies where not one of the
15:  conditions for a joyous beautiful life are present.
16: 
17:  I’m so glad to be in this place; it’s not Matjesfontein, but even here
18:  lying in the ?stones on the bank one could enjoy ones friends
19: 
20:  Oh I wish I had you here if only for one day. We couldn’t see each
21:  other in London because when we did meet we were both too tired. I
22:  suppose it’s a thing there is no hope of???
23: 
24:  I have got a large journal of Seymour Fort’s about his travels ^in
25:  Mashona land.^. I wonder if there would be any harm in letting Adela
26:  see it? My feeling is so strongly its best for her to know as much
27:  about him as possible. It’s so terrible this way we women dream &
28:  dream of things absent & unattainable. We are stronger than men before
29:  the actual, but it’s these dreams & unsatisfied yearnings that take
30:  all the life out of one.
31: 
32:  There is so many things I want to talk about but they are not things
33:  one can write of
33: 
34:  Good bye.
35:  Olive
36: 
37:  I shall be here till the middle of September
38: 

Notation
The novel Alice Corthorn appeared as a character in has not been established. The ‘large journal’ by Seymour Fort might have been a manuscript as no such item appears among his publications, while its contents may have been used in writing his studies of Jameson and Beit. See G. Seymour Fort (1908) Dr Jameson London: Hurst & Blackett; and (1932) Alfred Beit: A Study of the Man and His Work London: Ivor Nicholson & Watson.