Olive Schreiner Letters Online

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: SMD 30/33 h(i)
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	23 October 1910
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To
Who To	Adela Villiers Smith nee Villiers
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 Adela Villiers Smith nee Villiers, 23 October 1910, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This typescripted extract from a letter to Adela Villiers Smith was produced by Cronwright-Schreiner using original letters when he was preparing The Life... (1924) and The Letters of Olive Schreiner (1924). With a few exceptions, the original letters in his possession were then destroyed, as with many Schreiner letters he had been given by Adela Villiers Smith. When Schreiner’s originals can be compared, this shows his versions to be severely shortened, and/or inaccurate in sometimes minor but sometimes major respects, while their frequent multiple dates (eg. 8-15 August, or August) indicate that he often combined a number of original letters, among other bowdlerisations and intrusions as well as deletions. While this surviving Villiers Smith extract, archived among Cronwright-Schreiner’s miscellaneous papers, is affected by the same problems, it is provided for the sake of completeness, because it gives clues as to where Schreiner was resident, and indicates some of her activities. However, it should be read and used with considerable caution for the reasons spelled out here.

1:  To Mrs. Francis Smith
2:  De Aar, 23 Oct. 1910
3: 
4: 
5:  … Last night we had an earthquake here. I had been bad and lain down
6:  all day, but at 9 o’clock I went out to look at the stars and breathe
7:  a little. It was perfectly, deadly still not a breath of air stirring
8:  and I came back, and lay down on my bed again. At a quarter past nine,
9:  a most astonishing series of shocks began with the most terrific noise
10:  I ever heard in my life. The house reeled and shook, and when you
11:  stood up on the floor you felt like a little rat in the jaws of a
12:  great dog that was shaking you this way and that, and the noise was
13:  astonishing, a sound of bursting and rushing. After the first shock
14:  there was a pause and then it began again, but it was all over in
15:  three or four minutes and a perfect dead silence reigned again. I have
16:  been through several earthquake shocks in Italy, that great one that
17:  killed so many people in 1889, I think it was. But though the ground
18:  moved much more, the noise was nothing to this. This morning the hotel
19:  keeper’s wife in the Camp sent up the barman early before breakfast to
20:  ask how I was, knowing I’d been here alone, and the man told me nearly
21:  every bottle and glass was smashed in the bar, but I haven’t seen
22:  anyone else to-day to know if much damage was done.
23: 
24: 

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: SMD 30/33 h(ii)
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	3 August 1910
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To
Who To	Adela Villiers Smith nee Villiers
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 Adela Villiers Smith nee Villiers, 3 August 1910, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This typescripted extract from a letter to Adela Villiers Smith was produced by Cronwright-Schreiner using original letters when he was preparing The Life... (1924) and The Letters of Olive Schreiner (1924). With a few exceptions, the original letters in his possession were then destroyed, as with many Schreiner letters he had been given by Adela Villiers Smith. When Schreiner’s originals can be compared, this shows his versions to be severely shortened, and/or inaccurate in sometimes minor but sometimes major respects, while their frequent multiple dates (eg. 8-15 August, or August) indicate that he often combined a number of original letters, among other bowdlerisations and intrusions as well as deletions. While this surviving Villiers Smith extract, archived among Cronwright-Schreiner’s miscellaneous papers, is affected by the same problems, it is provided for the sake of completeness, because it gives clues as to where Schreiner was resident, and indicates some of her activities. However, it should be read and used with considerable caution for the reasons spelled out here.

1:  To Mrs. Francis Smith
2:  De Aar, 3rd Aug. 1910
3: 
4:  … I am trying Upton Sinclair’s starving plan, absolute fasting. I have
5:  just begun; for 42 hours I have now tasted nothing but two cups of
6:  water, very small ones. If the de Aar water was good and I could drink
7:  much, which is allowed I think it would be much better. I shall keep
8:  on till next Thursday night. That will be 108 hours. If I find that it
9:  does good I’ll try it for ten days. I’m afraid you couldn’t try it if
10:  you are too thin. Last night I still felt hungry and when I saw my
11:  husband eating his supper wished so much for a slice of brown bread.
12:  Now I have got to the point where you feel a dislike for food or drink.
13:  It is very cold weather here. We had 6 degrees of frost last night:
14:  the only drawback is that (it) feels a little cold. I think summer
15:  would be the best time to try it. I wonder if the doctors have ever
16:  tried it for you. The idea is that it takes all the poison germs out
17:  of the system.
18: 
19: 
20: 

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Mr Boonzaier 87.17/1/Boon/1
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	After Start: 1902 ; Before End: 1913
Address From	na
Address To
Who To	Daniel Cornelis Boonzaier
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 Daniel Cornelis Boonzaier, 1902, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This letter can be approximately dated around Schreiner's comment about women?s emancipation as having been written after the South African War and before she left South Africa for Europe in late 1913, and perhaps most likely between 1907 and 1913.

1:  Dear Mr Boonzier
2: 
3:  I didn't make myself clear. I should really feel it an honour to be
4:  sketched by you; but I don't care to have my self printed ^& don't
5:  think any one here would care to have it.^ I'll write something for the
6:  paper when I can manage it.
7: 
8:  Yours ever
9:  Olive Schreiner
10: 
11:  P.S.
12:  I'm always hoping you will see the question of women's emancipation
13:  from my stand^-point^ & give us one of your finest pictures one of these
14:  days!
15: 
16: 
17: 

Notation

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/a
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	5 August 1886
Address From	The Convent, Harrow, London
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 103

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 Edward Carpenter, 5 August 1886, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  The Convent
2:  Harrow
3:  Aug 5 / 86
4: 
5:  My dear E.C.
6: 
7:  So many people are wanting copies of of your paper on Simplification
8:  of Life. Couldn't you publish it in separate pamphlet form. I think it
9:  would be rather a good thing if at some time soon you could gather
10:  your papers together & publish them in news a small vol=
11:  including the 'Interest" paper. I hope whenever you publish anything
12:  fresh you will at once let me know.
13: 
14:  I have been reading Whitman of late with much more enjoyment than ever
15:  before. I find he's not so good as you are when one is ill & wants
16:  help & strength, one needs to be strong & in overflowing health really
17:  to enjoy him. I wonder whether you find it so.
18: 
19:  I'm so glad to hear you saw Mrs Walters, but its only after knowing
20:  her for years that the beauty of her character becomes clear.
21: 
22:  O. Schreiner
23: 

Notation
For Carpenter's 'simplification of life' ideas, see Edward Carpenter (1905) The Simplification of Life: From the Writings of Edward Carpenter London: A. Treherne & Co. The Whitman which Schreiner was reading is: Walt Whitman (1855) Leaves of Grass New York: Brooklyn. Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in various respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/b
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	31 December 1899
Address From	Newlands, Cape Town
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 229

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 Edward Carpenter, 31 December 1899, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on its front.

1:  Old years night
2: 
3:  Dear Ed
4: 
5:  This is just a note to tell you that Cron is going to England next
6:  week. He sails on the 10th by the Norman, so will get to England about
7:  the 25th. He is going home to hold meetings & see people on the South
8:  African question. This hellish war is still going on, but the
9:  capitalists are finding the African Boer a little tougher to swallow
10:  than they thought; impossible as it seems when our numbers are
11:  considered I believe we shall yet win & our Republics keep their
12:  freedom. If he comes up north you might help a bit getting the working
13:  men together Sheffield way. His address will be care
14: 
15:  JA Hobson
16:  Elmstead
17:  Limpsfield
18:  Surrey
19: 
20:  Olive
21: 
22:  My address will be still Lyndall
23:  Newlands
24:  Cape Town
25: 
26:  ^I can't leave I must stay here to see how things go. OS^
27: 

Notation
Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in various respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/c
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	17 June 1904
Address From	Hanover, Northern Cape
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 243-4

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 Edward Carpenter, 17 June 1904, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  Hanover
2:  June 17 / 04
3: 
4:  Dear old Edward
5: 
6:  Some friends have asked me to come to England & they say you wanted me
7:  to come too. It can't be that I go. But its very very very beautiful
8:  that you any of you want me. I specially want to see you again.
9: 
10:  It's a cold night. I am sitting in the little front room of our three
11:  roomed cottage with a fire at my back. We have 16 degrees of frost
12:  here at night often in the winter, the milk froze solid in the pantry
13:  the other night, & to-day a dish of water standing in the yard which
14:  was frozen last night was not melted except at the edges this evening
15:  though the sun had been shining on it all day. I have never felt cold
16:  anywhere in Europe except once in Geneva where a little north wind was
17:  blowing.
18: 
19:  Cron has gone to the Transvaal, & I & my meerkats, & my dog & a little
20:  Kaffir boy of nine years old whom I brought up from the reformatory in
21:  Cape Town have the world to ourselves. My dear old meerkat, 'Arriet,
22:  is sleeping on my shoulder. She will sit there for hours wide awake
23:  while I write & do my work. I'm always so glad I didn't come into the
24:  world when people had killed off all the dear beautiful animals &
25:  birds.
26: 
27:  My little Kaffir boy is so nice. He was sentenced for four years for
28:  killing a goat. He has served two in the Reformatory & I have got him
29:  for two. He is only a baby, & so sweet & dear. I am feeding him up: he
30:  is awfully thin. I am so fond of Kaffirs, there's a kind of natural
31:  affinity between me & them. And the capitalist are working for a big
32:  war with them soon, & we shall murder them right & left. They will
33:  kill a good many of us because they have been all armed & trained by
34:  the British during the war, & England will be greatly surprised when
35:  the war comes at what she has drawn on herself; but in the end the
36:  natives will be crushed & the capitalist will have cheap native labour,
37:  when the tribal & communal system which now prevents the employers
38:  from blood-sucking them, is broken up. Besides some of their
39:  territories are rich in mineral wealth & the white man wants it.
40: 
41:  Its pretty sad out here, Edward, in many, many ways. The saddest
42:  thing is the reaction that has come over us since the war, or rather
43:  since the "peace". The little quiet Boer woman who the day after we
44:  heard of the "peace" came to my rooms & when I told her that the
45:  "peace" had been made & the Republics had not got their independence
46:  unreadable ^threw^ her arms over her head & astonished me by crying,
47:  "Then there is no God! There is no God!" is very indicative of our
48:  state of mind. There is a kind of awful moral disintegration among us.
49:  England here is going straight on to her destruction but the effects
50:  of the war upon us have been very terrible.
51: 
52:  Edith Ellis says she saw you lately & you were looking well. I'm so
53:  glad. I have had a very beautiful little visit to Cape Town while my
54:  husband was there in Parliament. It was so beautiful to see my four
55:  friends. Now I've come back to this strange, sad unearthly little
56:  village, which doesn't seem to be in world at all, & my visit seems
57:  like a glorious dream. But its much to have had a lovely dream. And
58:  now the beautiful letters I have had from Edith & Mr Lawrence & other
59:  friends asking me to come to England have been a great joy to me, how
60:  great I can't explain because no one knows how lonely this life is.
61: 
62:  I can't go to England because I couldn't leave my husband for so long
63:  just for my own pleasure. I should always fancy he might be ill, or
64:  might need me. And I couldn't do any good by going to England. There's
65:  nothing to be done by talking now for this sad land. A better day will
66:  come, but much has to be lived through first.
67: 
68:  Dear Edward I wish I could see. I wasn't half grateful enough when I
69:  was in England for all my many friends. Whatever life has or hasn't
70:  given me, it's given me the best friends any one ever had. (I wish you
71:  could see my little meerkat sitting here with her head under my chin
72:  as I write. She's so lovely.)
73: 
74:  Good night. Remember me to all the old friends.
75:  Olive
76: 
77:  ^You see Edward, the terrible point in our position in South Africa now
78:  is that its not true. Since the 'peace' came, we, naturally, are
79:  acting a part. We know perfectly well that we are not beaten, & that
80:  we are going to conquer in the long run & that England will someday go
81:  out bag & baggage, & yet we are all to act as if we didn't know this.
82:  Perhaps, it may be said, its the only attitude people crushed for the
83:  moment can assume. How painful it is, how it makes one resolve you
84:  will absolutely say nothing at all. I think you can understand. I do
85:  not object to silence. But I do object to protestations of loyalty to
86:  the King or the Empire, when we know we are cursing them in our hearts.
87:  The curious thing to see is that England can be taken in by it. This
88:  is private, Edward.^
89: 

Notation
Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in a range of respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/ci
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Lettercard
Letter Date	2 November 1900
Address From	Hanover, Northern Cape
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 231

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 Edward Carpenter, 2 November 1900, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner lettercard, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, and the address it was sent to is on its front. Schreiner was resident in Hanover from September 1900 to October 1907, after 1902 with visits, sometimes fairly lengthy, elsewhere.

1:  Dear Edward
2: 
3:  Thanks for your article: it's very good - first rate. I am sending you
4:  a copy of my speech to ^letter^ at a woman's meeting at Somerset East.
5:  The jingoes are very anxious the British government would take action
6:  against me & arrest me for high treason! They are a funny people the
7:  jingoes. Eyes have they but they see not ears have they but they hear
8:  not. Things here are going from bad to worse. They are beginning to
9:  take women & children as prisoners of war on the charge the woman aid
10:  the men. war will not be over for another year at least. The
11:  Republicans are
12: 
13:  ^not yet beaten! The war is not over.
14: 
15:  Olive^
16: 

Notation
The article Carpenter had sent cannot be established. Schreiner spoke at or wrote addresses for the Volkskongresses and peace congresses which protested the South African War, as follows: Graaff-Reinet Volkskongres, April 1900 (spoke); Cape Town women's meeting, June 1900 (spoke); Somerset East peace congress, October 1900 (a letter of address); Paarl, November 1900 peace congress (a letter of address); Worcester Volkskongres, December 1900 (spoke). Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in a range of respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/cii
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Lettercard
Letter Date	22 October 1900
Address From	Hanover, Northern Cape
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 230

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 Edward Carpenter, 22 October 1900, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner lettercard, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  Hanover
2:  Oct 22 / 00
3: 
4:  Dear old Ed,
5: 
6:  The fight still goes on here, & still I have not lost heart, but
7:  believe that right must in the end prevail - though most people think
8:  me mad for doing so.
9: 
10:  I am sending you a speech in an African paper. I am living here in
11:  such a sweet ideal little karroo village nearly 5,000 feet above the
12:  sea, & am much better. The air is so clean & pure. How you would love
13:  this place.
14: 
15:  Greetings to all the dear friends.
16:  Olive
17: 

Notation
The speech published in a newspaper (presumably by Schreiner herself) which she sent to Carpenter cannot be established, but is likely to be one of those she wrote or gave as an address to a peace congress. Schreiner sent written addresses to some of the Volkskongresses and peace congresses and she spoke at others, as follows: Graaff-Reinet Volkskongres, April 1900 (spoke); Cape Town women's meeting, June 1900 (spoke); Somerset East peace congress, October 1900 (a letter of address); Paarl, November 1900 peace congress (a letter of address); Worcester Volkskongres, December 1900 (spoke). Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in a range of respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/d
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	20 December 1902
Address From	Hanover, Northern Cape
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 234-5

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 Edward Carpenter, 20 December 1902, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope. Schreiner was resident in Hanover from September 1900 to October 1907, after 1902 with visits, sometimes fairly lengthy, elsewhere.

1:  Dec 20th 1902
2: 
3:  Dear Edward
4: 
5:  Have you ever read a most rare & beautiful book called "the soul of a
6:  people" by Fielding Hall? To me it is the most beautiful book, the
7:  book that has come nearest to me of all books I have read in my life.
8:  Read it & tell me what you feel towards it, & towards the writer.
9: 
10:  My heart had felt so bitter & hard of late, & it has been like a
11:  beautiful soft rain falling on hard dry ground to read this book.
12: 
13:  You must get it & read it, Edward, if you have not already. It's a
14:  soul something like Bobs the man shows in the book; & it's what he
15:  makes one feel rather than anything he directly says that makes the
16:  book so precious.
17: 
18:  My love to you dear Edward
19:  Olive
20: 

Notation
The book referred to is: Harold Fielding Hall (1898) The Soul of a People London: R. Bentley & Son. Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in a range of respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/f
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	1908
Address From	na
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 276, 281-2

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 Edward Carpenter, 1908, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, although this is not fully legible; the envelope also provides the address the letter was sent to.

1:  Dear old Edward
2: 
3:  I like Kokoro more than any book I've read for a long time. Have you
4:  read "the Souls of Black Folks" I advised you to get. Tell me if you
5:  can how it strikes you.
6: 
7:  It's very strange the sympathy I feel with the Japs, & have always
8:  felt. It increases with all I know of them. That love of the past men
9:  & women & of your own dead. Ever since I was a child I've always
10:  thought if I had my ideal house there would be one room set apart
11:  where I would have the pictures of my dead & put flowers before them &
12:  anything that was beautiful to me. And I could go & sit there a little
13:  in quiet with them every day. It would be like a little chapel. - the
14:  only chapel I can think of - God, the whole life doesn't need a chapel
15:  - the sky is his roof. & I would have remembrances of all my animals
16:  that I have loved so utterly there. Buddhism is so much more wide &
17:  satisfying than Christianity can ever be, because it takes in the
18:  animal & world, & sees that all life is one.
19: 
20:  When I was reading that book several times it came to me how foolish
21:  we are ever to feel lonely in this world. Some where, we may always in
22:  time & space there exists which feels & thinks exactly as we do. No
23:  one is ever really alone.
24: 
25:  What do you think of matters in England? Is there going to be much of
26:  a forward movement? I fear not till the party splits & Grey & Asquith
27:  & the rest of their order go over to the other side.
28: 
29:  ^I have just had a wire from dear old General Butler; to-day he has
30:  landed in Cape Town. He is the one Englishman we South Africans really
31:  love; I mean among public men. I hope all goes well with you. Have you
32:  any news of our Bob. It's such a long long time since I heard from him.
33: 
34:  Olive^
35: 

Notation
The book Schreiner refers to as Kokoko is: Lefcadio Hearn (1895) Kokoro: Hints and Echoes of Japanese Inner Life London: Gay & Bird. See also W.E.B. Du Bois (1903) The Souls of Black Folk Chicago: A.C. McClurg. Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in various respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/gi
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	24 February 1908
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To
Who To	Edward Carpenter
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 Edward Carpenter, 24 February 1908, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections.

1:  De Aar
2:  Feb 24 / 08
3: 
4:  Dear Edward
5: 
6:  Can you send this letter for me to "Bob". His address is in my desk at
7:  Hanover, where I shall not go for some months. Only think, Im
8:  expecting to see dear old Keir Hardie here tomorrow to spend a day!! I
9:  shall be glad to see him. He's been met by rotten eggs & all the
10:  modern modes of welcoming any one with liberal ideas in South Africa.
11:  The day will come, only a few years hence, when white people who stand
12:  for justice to the native will have to lay down their lives & meet
13:  death at the hands of mobs here.
14: 
15:  If you could really understand affairs in Zulu-land & Natal
16: 
17:  ^you would know what a diabolical game is being played there. Love to
18:  Kate Salt if you see her & all the old friends. You would know if you
19:  lived here a few months how one hungers for the folk who share at all
20:  ones outlook on life.
21: 
22:  South Africa is quite 80 years behind Europe; & a century behind
23:  Australia & New Zealand.
24: 
25:  Olive^
26: 
27: 

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/gii
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	6 February 1908
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
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 Edward Carpenter, 6 February 1908, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  De Aar
2:  Feb 6th 1908
3: 
4:  Dear Edward
5: 
6:  Months ago I began the enclosed letter. I haven't written because I
7:  wanted to go on with it. But it's too big a subject to take up at a
8:  moment's odd time.
9: 
10:  Yesterday I got your little pamphlet - very good - thanks. I've sent
11:  one copy to my friend Constance Lytton who when she wrote had been
12:  some weeks ill in bed as the result of influenza & found your book
13:  Love's coming of age her best companion. I always among so many other
14:  things want to come to England that I could show you to eachother. She
15:  is a "born" socialist; one who couldn't have been anything else in
16:  what ever country or age she had been born. One to whom the letter of
17:  socialism is not necessary because they always live in its spirit. How
18:  are you, dear old pall? I sometimes get afraid when I think I never
19:  come to England & see your, dear old face again.
20: 
21:  For five months I have been living at a Railway camp in the desert
22:  called de Aar. Here four railway lines crossing South Africa meet; it
23:  is the greatest in fact the only great junction in the Colony & in the
24:  war it was one vast military camp much the biggest in South Africa. It
25:  was the great central camp & for miles & miles around the veld was
26:  trodden absolutely bear, & is still covered with their relics. We are
27:  living in one little room about a mile or three quarters of a mile
28:  from the camp ^station^, alone in the veld. Being here one is a little
29:  out of the dust & smoke of the trains. I have been very happy in this
30:  little room in spite of dust, & heat, & sand, & I am quite sorry my
31:  husband is building on some more rooms. It's really wonderful how the
32:  nature of your house simplifies & alters all life! But when the house
33:  is done in addition to the other rooms there will be one tiny spare
34:  room always ready for a traveller from Milthorp, if he should turn up.
35:  It will have a nice little plain blue paper on the wall, & be
36:  absolutely quiet. I've never had a spare room before except at
37:  Johannesburg. How it really seems to me perhaps you will turn up!
38: 
39:  You would like de Aar better than most people, because you like heat &
40:  in summer the thermometer stands at 110 & 111 in the shade on a
41:  verandah but the winters are just pleasantly warm - then you like
42:  railway men, & here there are nothing but railway-men; "niggers"; &
43:  the few hotel keepers & shop keepers who supply their wants. There is
44:  no "society" here except the bank manager's wife, & the English
45:  clergyman's wife, & the Engineer's wife. And only the Bank Manager's
46:  wife has called on me. I think she was so shocked at my little room
47:  with its bedroom & bathroom & study all in one that the others never
48:  came. De Aar is a low, drunken cursing swearing place; but anyhow it's
49:  free! In other upcountry towns you are prosecuted if you play golf on
50:  Sunday & fined, but there they play cricket & foot ball.
51: 
52:  The terribly oppressive shadow of the big Dutch Church, which rises up
53:  as the physical & mental centre of life in all upcountry towns &
54:  village, is very modest here, is very small & stands quite in the
55:  back-ground, & one can breath. My life is a very solitary one here,
56:  Cron goes to his business in the camp soon after seven in the morning,
57:  & I do not see a human creature again, except the little boy that
58:  brings the milk or water till near seven in the evening when Cron
59:  comes up for his bath & wash, & we we go down & have supper at the
60:  Hotel, where he has his dinner & breakfast. After supper we come up
61:  here generally about 8 o'clock: Cron works at his books accounts a
62:  little or goes to bed & reads, & I read or write & then go to bed: but
63:  its not nearly so lonely as Hanover as I do see Cron in the morning &
64:  evening & know he's well. I have my three dear little meerkats still,
65:  the eldest of whom is now over 7 years, an almost unheard of age for a
66:  meerkat, & Cron's little dog Ollie, who is the daughter of my dog &
67:  dear friend Neta.
68: 
69:  I have just been reading a book which if you have not read it you must
70:  at once, you will find it very interesting, "Eskimo Life" by Nansen.
71:  He must be a lovable man there is a most delicious letter in the book
72:  from a Greenlander to his missing [page/s missing]
73: 
74:  ^Good bye, write to me soon.
75:  Olive^
76: 
77:  ^Have you any late news of Bob & his family. I think the last letter I
78:  wrote to them must have been misaddressed. If not too much trouble
79:  give me their new address. I've had two very nice notes from your
80:  cousin. I want her to come & see me here in the winter.^
81: 

Notation
There is a missing page or pages after 'a Greenlander to his missing, with the next insertion on the first sheet of this letter. The 'enclosed letter' is no longer attached. It is not clear which pamphlet Carpenter had sent Schreiner, but from her comment about the earlier 'Love?s Coming of Age', it could be his (1908) The Intermediate Sex (London: Allen & Unwin). See also Edward Carpenter (1902) Love’s Coming of Age London: Swan Sonnenschein; and Fridtjof Nansen (1893) Eskimo Life London: Longman.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/h
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	7 January 1911
Address From	Portlock, Graaff-Reinet, Eastern Cape
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
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 Edward Carpenter, 7 January 1911, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  Portlock
2:  nr Graaff Reinet
3:  Cape of Good Hope
4:  Jan 7 / 11
5: 
6:  Dear old Edward
7: 
8:  It's born in on me I must write to you, though why I don't know. I'm
9:  staying on a farm high up among the mountains fifteen miles from the
10:  nearest railway station, to escape the great heat at de Aar for a
11:  couple of months. Its much cooler here, & I'm able to work a little. I
12:  wonder if you are writing anything. Write & tell me about yourself &
13:  all the dear friends. You'd like this place, it's so peaceful. A
14:  little lonely - but all places in Africa are that. Just as in England
15:  one would be if one slipped out of the 20th century into the 17th.
16: 
17:  We are just about 200 years behind the times, & as far as the natives
18:  & Indians go & our treatment of the them we are in the dark ages. Our
19:  "labour" members here (fine labour members!) have only one idea, to
20:  crush & keep down the native. They want to pass laws to prevent any
21:  coloured person from being allowed to do skilled labour, & they would
22:  like by law to limit their wages!!
23: 
24:  How is dear Isabella Ford? And Bob? And George Adams? If the spirit
25:  ever moves me drop me a line. I have a little book on the woman
26:  question coming out soon. I'll send you a copy. It's nothing much &
27:  that terrible man Unwin is I believe going to bring it out from the
28:  rough proofs I sent without waiting for my corrections in which case
29:  it will be absolute nonsense!
30: 
31:  Send me anything you write.
32: 
33:  I shall be here for a couple of months longer. I am boarding with the
34:  people of this farm; dear folk with three nice little children, but
35:  its a bit lonesome at times.
36: 
37:  Yours ever
38:  Olive
39: 

Notation
The 'little book' referred to is Woman and Labour.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/i
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	6 May 1911
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
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 Edward Carpenter, 6 May 1911, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  De Aar
2:  May 6th 1911
3: 
4:  Dear Edward
5: 
6:  Many years ago, I think it was in 92 or three 93 - just after I first
7:  came out to Africa I met a man in Cape Town. I only saw him for a few
8:  hours but he impressed me very much, he said he knew you & I think he
9:  said he knew Bob. He was a rather tall well built man, dark in the
10:  face something like myself if you imagine me a big man. I think he was
11:  a mining engineer, any how. He had come to Africa with the man who was
12:  with him to prospect or see about certain mines, I fancy in Wes
13:  German West Africa, but can't say just where. Emily ?Conebeare
14:  introduced him to me. He had some business connection with her brother
15:  he was interested in developing mines out here.
16: 
17:  He spoke as if he knew you well. The curious thing is that I can't
18:  remember his name it was Lionel Brackenbury or Brailsford, or some
19:  such long double name with a B - I'm not even quite sure of the Lionel
20:  - Perhaps the name was Brackenborough. I'm not sure it began with a B
21:  but it had a B in it! You will will say "What ever to you want to know
22:  for?" - I can't say, but I'm always wondering what's become of him. A
23:  party of us went for a walk up the Devil's Peak & he & I dis-cussed
24:  socialism & other things He was rather short of speech & carcastic,
25:  but he wrote me a very nice little note before he left - I only saw
26:  him on that walk - the note ended "shall we ever meet again & where?"
27:  I have always expected to meet him but have never. There are three
28:  other people that haunt me in the same way, a French man I passed in
29:  the street in Paris, a beautiful prostitute who travelled in a bus
30:  with me in London, & fashionable little woman I once meet ^saw^ in a
31:  restaurant, but did not even speak to. In some subtle way all four
32:  have a connection with me mentally that I can't explain, I can never
33:  forget them. You will wonder I have forgotten his name - but I never
34:  think of people by their names. When I think of you I never think the
35:  word Edward Carpenter - I see your face. I always see things in
36:  pictures not words.
37: 
38:  I
39: 
40:  Good bye dear Edward. Try to remember that man I met & tell me whats
41:  become of him. His name might have been Crabenthorp I don't know if he
42:  was a very good & noble man, or the other way round, but it was to me
43:  like meeting some one who belonged to me I or whom I'd known in a
44:  pre-state of existence! It might be Bracksbury but I think it had a
45:  "brough" at the end. I think he was rather wicked but saw too little
46:  of him to say
47: 
48:  Olive
49: 

Notation
An unknown hand has written 'Marshall Williams' in the margin next to Schreiner's description of the man she remembered meeting.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/j
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	4 July 1911
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 302

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 Edward Carpenter, 4 July 1911, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  De Aar
2:  July 4th 1911
3: 
4:  Dear E.C.
5: 
6:  I wrote you a longish letter to go off by this week's mail but I must
7:  have put it into an envelope addressed to some one else by mistake,
8:  for gone it is! Fortunately there was nothing it would matter any
9:  one's reading.
10: 
11:  //Thank you for that interesting notice of the man, but he's not my
12:  man. He was quite the opposite type Tall, dark, powerfully built,
13:  rather reserved & sarcastic - fonder of asking questions than of
14:  giving answers - the man who might make a revolution - but would never
15:  talk of one! I think he was a mining engineer. He came out I believe
16:  to prospect some mine in or lands in the interests of a man called
17:  Conybeare, who used to be member of parliament.
18: 
19:  Its long long years since I met him; it must have been in 1991 or 1992
20:  or at at very latest 1993.When I went to England in - 93 that time
21:  when Bob had just got engaged before I married my impression is that
22:  when I spoke of him to you & Bob you both said you knew him! We didn't
23:  say much about him, I just mentioned that I'd met him & he said he
24:  knew you, & you as though you knew him very well. He was the type of
25:  man who might have been a public school man & a University man. I
26:  think what attracted me to him was the sense of deep, restrained,
27:  passion. When I say his eyes were wicked - I mean that they were the
28:  eyes of a man who if he wanted anything very much would be driven by
29:  passion to strike down every thing that stood in his way; & who could
30:  yet be very tender. We only spent one afternoon together up on the
31:  mountain side. He told Miss Conybeare he wanted to meet me & he & his
32:  friend were only in Cape Town for a few days, so she asked us all to
33:  go for this climb on the mountain, & we lay among the silver trees
34:  high up on the Devils Peak & talked. I had a curious feeling that
35:  there was a singularly close friendship between him & his little fair
36:  common place companion - a may man almost his own years age I
37:  should say he was then between 25 or or 28 so he must be far
38:  over 40 now.
39: 
40:  It is very curious why I want to know if he's dead or what became of
41:  him! I always used to expect to hear of him turning up among the rich
42:  mining engineers at Johannesburg. But I don't know if he was a mining
43:  engineer or but it was my impression he was.
44: 
45:  I spend my life so entirely alone now, most of it shut up in this room,
46:  that my mind goes roving much over the past, & things & people I knew
47:  when I still lived among humanbeings seem so close & real to me.
48: 
49:  I wonder if you & Bob have got the copies of Women & Labour I sent you
50:  yet? Its a curious idea of yours that Gibbon! of all people had
51:  anything to do with my view in the book. Its always seemed strange to
52:  me that Gibbon seems almost to ignore the existence of woman! &
53:  certainly never touches on any problem of sex.
54: 
55:  Where he is valuable is in his dissection of the rise of Christianity
56:  but above all he, & he only, paints widely & clearly the causes which
57:  have led to the division of Europe into its present form of nations.
58:  Monson's Rome, now, teams with interesting information with regard to
59:  woman; & all the old Greek plays & Homer, & even dear old Heroditus
60:  pours light on the question of woman & her position in ancient times.
61: 
62:  I am going to have a great pleasure tomorrow when Ida Hyett is coming
63:  to stay at the hotel for a week, & I shall see her every day. We are
64:  having the best weather of our year now beautifully cold & dry & the
65:  veld has quite a tinge of green after the late rains, so I hope she'll
66:  enjoy it. No one has ever been to see me here since Keir Hardie was
67:  here some years ago, so its a grand event.
68: 
69:  My brother Will has gone to attend the Universal Races Congress in
70:  London, or rather sails tomorrow. I wonder if you'll be going & meet
71:  him there. He's a grand old fellow - his nature & sympathies deepening
72:  & widening so wonderfully as he grows older. He is also taking his son
73:  & daughter to Cambridge.
74: 
75:  Good bye dear old Edward.
76: 
77:  Thine ever
78:  Olive
79: 

Notation
The book referred to is: Theodor Mommsen (1867-77) The History of Rome Leipzig: Reimer & Hirsel.. Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in various respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/k
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	16 September 1911
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 303

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 Edward Carpenter, 16 September 1911, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  De Aar
2:  Sep 16th 1911
3: 
4:  Ed dear,
5: 
6:  I'm sending you another copy of my book. I think the mystery is solved
7:  as to what becomes of all the things I post.
8: 
9:  I sent twelve copies of my book to England, & except Ellis & Alice
10:  Corthorn no one seems to have got them. I sent one to Isabella Ford &
11:  one to Bob, but neither have written to say they'd got them. I sent a
12:  copy to General Hertzog too in this country which hes never got. I
13:  have been in despair & written to the general post office to complain.
14:  Now it appears (Cron has just found it out) that Cron's little office
15:  boy - who always takes the letters & parcels to the post has been
16:  robbing him right & left. He's taken money to the tune of 10 or 12
17:  pounds in small sums, & has made a system of selling the stamps in the
18:  post office. Cron says he has no doubt he has taken my parcels &
19:  letters for the sake of the stamps on them! I suppose he thought he
20:  wouldn't be found out if they were sent so far away as England. Please
21:  ask Isabella & Bob if they got their copies. I can't send them any
22:  more because all my copies are done.
23: 
24:  I am working hard at my little garden. Gardening is such a passion
25:  with me. I've been reading a most fascinating book on Education in
26:  Greece boy ^by^ a young Cambridge man called Kenneth Freeman, who is
27:  dead. The Greeks were so wise in making the learning of poetry one of
28:  the great methods of educating young children.
29: 
30:  I wish we had a library here. The kind of books I want to read are
31:  nearly always expensive books.
32: 
33:  Good bye. Your old pal,
34:  Olive
35: 
36:  I wish you could see my little niece Ursula Schreiner who's just gone
37:  to Cambridge. She's such an interesting girl 19 years old. Ever since
38:  she was a little child she's had such a curious instinctive hatred of
39:  in-justice. The other day she got in a railway carriage & a poor
40:  shabby old man got in, & the guard bullied him most unjustly. She at
41:  once took up arms & wrote a letter to the paper to defend him. She's
42:  very reserved & one doesn't
43: 
44:  ^get to know her soon - like the elder sister.^
45: 

Notation
'Another copy' refers to Woman and Labour. The book referred to is: Kenneth Freeman (1907) Schools of Hellas London: Macmillan. Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in various respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/l
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	24 April 1912
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 305

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 Edward Carpenter, 24 April 1912, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  De Aar
2:  April 24th 1912
3: 
4:  Dear Edward
5: 
6:  I now & then hear a word of you from some one who has seen you & they
7:  say all seems going well.
8: 
9:  We are having a real old De Aar sand storm at this moment, Great
10:  clouds of sand marching across the veld like armies & sweeping over us.
11:  It is the afternoon, but the sand makes it so dark one can hardly see
12:  to write. My cat & two dogs have rushed in from the garden to take
13:  refuge in the house. Animals are still as much joy to me as ever, &
14:  reading. But perhaps the thing that gives me most pleasure in life is
15:  the thought of the new young girls growing up like my niece Lyndall so
16:  beautiful & free & strong; knowing nothing of all we have lived
17:  through. My niece is studying law for which she a great liking. She
18:  may never practice as a barrister if she marries or finds her work in
19:  politics; but she will, I hope, break the way through for other women
20:  to gain the freedom to practice if they will.
21: 
22:  My sister Ettie who has practically been dying of heart disease for
23:  two years still lingers on, fighting bravely. For four months she has
24:  not been able to lie down, & has to have some one always to hold her
25:  up in bed. I have only seen one other such terrible struggle with
26:  death.
27: 
28:  We have just got the full news of the loss of the Titanic, & dear old
29:  Stead's passing. You know I've never loved the sea as I have the land
30:  & the sky, the dear, wonderful sky.
31: 
32:  Things are going very badly in our political world; the one little bit
33:  of brightness I see is that the natives are slowly awakening. But the
34:  white men are determined on a great native war.
35: 
36:  Good bye. I love you dear old Edward
37:  Olive
38: 

Notation
Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in various respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/m
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	29 April 1913
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 324-5

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 Edward Carpenter, 29 April 1913, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections.

1:  De Aar
2:  April 29 / 13
3:  /13
4: 
5:  My dear old Edward
6: 
7:  I wonder how the world goes with you. I often wonder just what your
8:  feeling about the suffragettes is. Every year my horror not only of
9:  war, but of the argument of brute force all round grows stronger &
10:  stronger. If ever was the exercise of force was justified it is in the
11:  case of millions of women fighting from freedom. But is it ever
12:  justified - are not the evils greater than good? Cromwell, Washington
13:  all the worlds heroes who fought for freedom were they justified? I
14:  see so much to be said on both sides. Now I can only say I am for
15:  passive resistance, but I dare not condemn those who are not. Of
16:  course theres the narrow question of tactics - is it wise - even if
17:  right - at any given time to fight?
18: 
19:  Things as far as the working classes in England go seem advancing
20:  quickly. But the fight for freedom will have to go on through the
21:  centuries, because as soon as one class or party or race becomes
22:  dominant it oppresses the others. Look at our Dutch here?? But one day,
23:  far away I guess we shall come to a full bloom.
24: 
25:  I've no news of myself to give your. We are still living in our little
26:  cottage in De Aar with the sand & deserts about us, all in the old way.
27:  Cron thinks of going for a visit of some months to Europe this year,
28:  but I can't afford to. Perhaps he will see you if he comes. Its sad to
29:  think good old George Adams is gone.
30: 
31:  Thin ever as of old
32:  Olive
33: 

Notation
Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in various respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/n
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	23 July 1913
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
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 Edward Carpenter, 23 July 1913, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  De Aar
2:  July 23rd 1913
3: 
4:  Dear Edward
5: 
6:  I am sending you an account of our Sundays meeting. If you want to
7:  understand the labour position out here read ?Balmsfords speech. If
8:  they shoot us down so the moment the white labourers strike, what will
9:  it be whenever the natives move: & we are bringing more & more
10:  oppressive laws against them. We have just passed a terrible native
11:  land bill - the worst bit of work we have done for years. I will try &
12:  send you a copy of my brothers speech in the senate on it. It is
13:  beautiful how liberal & broad & human he is growing as he grows older.
14:  I am perhaps coming to England in December on my way to Florence to
15:  try is a heart specialist there who has so greatly relieved my friend
16:  Emily Hobhouse can do anything for me. I shall be only two weeks or
17:  less in England as I can't stand the climate at thisof England in
18:  winter, but I do hope I'll see you, Edward. In the end I may not be
19:  well enough to leave; but it would be nice to see you all once more.
20: 
21:  Good bye dear old Edward.
22:  Thine ever
23:  Olive
24: 
25:  Do you ever see dear Isabella Ford? Send on the newspaper cutting I
26:  send to her. If they do have a general strike they are going to shoot
27:  us down all over the country, with their British troops & their
28:  "Defense Force" - "Citizens Destruction Force" - it is really.
29: 

Notation
The 'account of Sunday's meeting' is no longer attached.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/o
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	26 October 1913
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
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 Edward Carpenter, 26 October 1913, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  De Aar
2:  Oct 26th 1913
3: 
4:  Dear Edward,
5: 
6:  Thank you for your letter. I sail from Africa on the 6th of Dec= in
7:  the Edinburgh Castle & arrive in England on Tuesday the 23rd just
8:  before Xmas. I am going to Alice Corthorns for the short time I am in
9:  England. Her address is
10: 
11:  30 St Mary Abbotts Terrace
12:  Kensington.
13:  London W.
14: 
15:  Pethick Lawrence has promised me that he or his wife will be in
16:  readiness to take me on to Italy as soon as I am able to be moved.
17:  Isn't it good of them? I do think I have the kindest & best friends in
18:  the world. It seems to me that no one has just such friends. I shall
19:  likely stay on the Riviera for some time till I get stronger, & go on
20:  to Florence to try the cure when it is a little warmer.
21: 
22:  Botha, the Prime Minister here said the other day in a ^public^ speech,
23:  "Socialism will never enter South Africa"! Mrs Partington & her broom!?
24: 
25:  Good bye, dear old Edward.
26:  Olive
27: 
28:  ^Remember me to Isabella Ford & Mat if you see them.^
29: 
30: 

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/p
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	18 February 1914
Address From	Grand Hotel, Alassio, Italy
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 330

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 Edward Carpenter, 18 February 1914, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on its front.

1:  Le Grand Hotel et d'Alassio
2:  Alassio
3: 
4:  Dear Ed
5: 
6:  I feel I want to write to you this evening. I wonder what you think of
7:  our Cape affairs; what we are drifting towards is a military
8:  dictatorship. I always knew these things must come but I had hoped it
9:  would have taken longer.
10: 
11:  Is your old friend "?Cholmundy" the man I saw at Millthorp who sang
12:  the Italian songs now in Italy with his wife? There was a man here the
13:  other night who looked exactly like him but he was gone the next
14:  morning. He has a long beard.
15: 
16:  I shall leave for Florence at the end of this month. I shall of course
17:  not send your card to Herron as so soon after his wife's death he will
18:  not want to be troubled with strangers. I shall send the other card as
19:  I shall be glad to know some one in Florence. The two people I used to
20:  know are away now.
21: 
22:  I've been ill in bed for some time with my old trouble stone in the
23:  kidney, but am quite better again. The people visiting in the hotel
24:  were most kind to me took it by turns to sit up with me at night & did
25:  all they could. Their kindness was most touching, especially when I
26:  think that a month ago I'd not seen one of them. I seem to have met
27:  with nothing but love & kindness since I landed in England.
28: 
29:  I've got a curious shrinking from leaving this dear place & going to
30:  Florence. If I were superstitious I should think it boded some
31:  misfortune, but when one has these foreboding feelings they sometimes
32:  turn out nothing. It was grand to see dear old Bob again. You don't
33:  know what that little peep of you & him meant to me. He sweeter &
34:  finer than ever but not so strong. I think he works too hard at the
35:  kind of work that is not joy to him. He was never meant to be a mere
36:  teacher; but each of us must take life as it comes. Whan an almost
37:  terrible resignation one regards life with at last.
38: 
39:  I have just finished reading the life of Lafcadio Hearn by Nina
40:  Kennard, its good but she doesn't understand him so well as you or I
41:  would. But you'll find it interesting if you've not read it. Some of
42:  the things written about him have been so full of lies - as all lives
43:  must be written of people whoby those who don't understand them. I
44:  suppose no man's life ever was or could be truly written except by God.
45: 
46:  Good night, dear old Edward.
47: 
48:  I wish you were coming to Florence too. Ellis said he'd come, but I
49:  don't know if he'll be able to. At first I have to go & stay at a
50:  horrid cold hotel the Hotel ?Pavle away at the top end of the Lungaro,
51:  but I'll only stay there for a week & try to find some more congenial
52:  place. One has to be on the Lungarno or some where one can get sun at
53:  this time of year.
54: 
55:  My love to you.
56:  Olive
57: 
58:  ^Hasn't Edith Ellis developed so splendidly. She's finer than ever.^
59: 
60:  ^Did I tell you I'd got a long letter from Ida Hyett.^
61: 
62: 
63: 

Notation
This letter is written on printed headed notepaper. The book referred to is Nina Kennard (1911) Lafcadio Hearn London: Nash. Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of the letter is incorrect in various respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/q
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	13 October 1914
Address From	Durrants Hotel, Manchester Square, Westminster, London
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 340-41

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 Edward Carpenter, 13 October 1914, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on its front. The letter is written on printed headed notepaper which has been crossed through.

1:  The Windsor
2:  61 & 62 Lancaster Gate, W.
3: 
4:  Durrants Hotel
5:  Manchester Square
6:  London W.
7: 
8:  Dear old Edward
9: 
10:  I think so much of your tired face as you went away. You know Edward
11:  can live through all this but its crushing us, who had such hopes for
12:  the future 20 years ago. If you come to London come & see me. We'll go
13:  on the top of the tram to Hampton Court & look at the pictures there.
14: 
15:  My darling nephew Oliver Schreiner who was doing so brilliantly at
16:  Cambridge has become an English officer & joined his regiment so may
17:  be sent to the front at any moment guarding he is now in Kent guarding
18:  the coast.
19: 
20:  In Africa things are very terrible. We shall bath the red sands of
21:  German West Africa with the best blood of our youth, going to rob it
22:  from the Germans who have never done anything to us. De Aar is the
23:  first big place toward German West Africa - if the Germans are driven
24:  to come into the Cape by our attacking them that is where the first
25:  big fighting will be. When I think of my husband my heart feels sore.
26: 
27:  Good bye dear. Edward
28:  Olive
29: 
30:  I wish I could feel with you that this war is going to bring the
31:  kingdom of heaven. I feel it is the beginning of a half a century of
32:  the most awful wars the world has seen. First this - then another war
33:  of probably England & Germany against Russia, then as the years pass
34:  with India, Japan & China & the native races of Africa. While the
35:  desire to dominate, & rule & possess empire is in the hearts of men
36:  there will always be war.
37: 

Notation
Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in various respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/ri
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	4 January 1915
Address From	Kensington Palace Mansions, De Vere Gardens, Kensington, London
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
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 Edward Carpenter, 4 January 1915, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on its front. The letter is on printed headed notepaper.

1:  Kensington Palace Mansions & Hotel,
2:  De Vere Gardens, W.
3: 
4:  Dear Edward
5: 
6:  Lady Low came to see me & I dined with her last night. I find her a
7:  most charming person with great gifts of mind & large gifts of heart.
8:  She knew & admired your sister so much. I am sending you a cutting
9:  from the Cape. The labour men there are standing out better than I had
10:  hoped. Cron is a member of the Labour Party. I am a member of nothing,
11:  I keep free. I am writing an article on war (enclosed).
12: 
13:  I hope I shall meet Jean Langent the French socialist when th he comes
14:  over to that International meeting of socialists here this week.
15: 
16:  Love to you
17:  Olive
18: 

Notation
The 'article on war' which Schreiner enclosed cannot be established, but could have been one of her war-time short articles/open letters or else one of her anti-war allegories.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/rii
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	January 1915
Address From	Kensington Palace Mansions, De Vere Gardens, Kensington, London
Address To
Who To	Edward Carpenter
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 346

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 Edward Carpenter, January 1915, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date has been written on this letter in an unknown hand and it is on printed headed notepaper.

1:  Kensington Palace Mansions & Hotel,
2:  De Vere Gardens, W.
3: 
4:  My dear old Edward
5: 
6:  I think you think I am a horrid person, but you know its just because
7:  you've always been to me so exhalt, so far above all national & class
8:  prejudice that it almost stunned me to believe you approved of the war.
9:  I don't care a bit what ordinary people think & feel. I have not
10:  exchanged one word on the way with a living human being for three
11:  months, except you, & Isabella Ford - who being a quaker of course is
12:  against it. I suppose it's because I've lived through a great war, &
13:  seen that the evils that result from it & follow it are infinitely
14:  greater than the war itself. The militarism, the spirit of hate &
15:  inhumanity which affects all people who have lived through a war, are
16:  much worse than the fighting & dying.
17: 
18:  South Africa is again bathed in blood - the hatred of course has never
19:  died - which was left by the war of ten years ago. Love begets love, &
20:  hate & war beget hate & war as surely as black men beget black
21:  children & white men white. For a time there may be no actual war; but
22:  it will begin again when the seed has had time to grow. I'm going up
23:  to Hampstead on the 11th of Jan. till then I shall be here. My address
24:  at Hampstead will be 15 Carlingford Road Hampstead Heath. I shall not
25:  be quite so lonely there as I am here as dear little Dollie Radford
26:  lives there & I can sometimes go to see her. I haven't known a person
27:  be as lonely as I am in England now. In the Boer war many liberals &
28:  working men were opposed to war; but now we are but a tiny handful. In
29:  four years time - when the pay day comes we shall be a multitude -
30:  what will that help!
31: 
32:  Now I'll never never talk about the war to you again, if you'll only
33:  come & see me when you come to town. What a dear man that George was
34:  who came with you. Give him my love & give it to Ida Hyett when you
35:  see her.
36: 
37:  Yours with a lot of love
38:  Olive
39: 
40: 
41: 

Notation
Edward Carpenter has written onto this letter 'I didn't approve of the war! but we couldn't help it.' Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of the letter is incorrect in various respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/s
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	Monday February 1916
Address From	30 St Mary Abbotts Terrace, Kensington, London
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
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 Edward Carpenter, February 1916, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date has been derived from the postmark on an attached envelope, although this is not fully legible; the envelope also provides the address the letter was sent to.

1:  30 St Mary Abbotts Terrace
2:  Monday
3: 
4:  My dear Edward
5: 
6:  I'm writing to you just to give myself a little pleasure. It was so
7:  fine seeing you.
8: 
9:  I'm writing a little tiny thing for the Labour Leader. Whether they
10:  put it in or not, I'll send it you; I know you'll understand. I call
11:  it "A few words to the young men of the No-Conscription Fellowship".
12:  They are having a fine chance to testify to the sense of unity which
13:  ought to bind all humanbeings. I've seen Lady Low since I saw you: I
14:  grow near her & nearer her in feeling. She & Lilly Batthyiny are the
15:  two best friends I have now, & you introduced me to both of them.
16: 
17:  I am feeling anxious about America. Not just now but bye & bye there
18:  will be a great war between her & England.
19: 
20:  I saw my brother Will on Sunday so I have had quite an exciting week
21:  seeing two people. He spoke with great admiration of you & said he
22:  would like to see you if you came to Town again.
23: 
24:  There has been no steamer from Africa for the last 11 days, & I feel
25:  anxious when such a long time passes without any news from my husband.
26: 
27:  Good bye.
28:  Olive
29: 

Notation
The 'little thing' Schreiner was writing is 'On "conscientious objectors"' Labour Leader 16 March 1916 (see also Appendix H, (ed) S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner (1924) The Letters of Olive Schreiner London: Fisher Unwin).

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/t
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	Saturday 13 March 1916
Address From	Alexi, The Park, Hampstead, London
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
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 Edward Carpenter, 13 March 1916, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on its front.

1:  Alexi
2:  31 The Park
3:  Hampstead
4:  Saturday
5: 
6:  Dear EC
7: 
8:  You will see from the above where I am staying in our dear friends
9:  house while they are away. Its so beautiful & peaceful here, like
10:  Heaven! Don't forget I'm here if you come to town. Lloyd came to see
11:  me the other evening, & he's going to bring his woman friend to see me
12:  & play Beethoven to me one evening. I never forget how beautifully you
13:  & Kate Salt played together at Millthorpe. Give my love to Kate, &
14:  tell her where I am in case she comes to Town & come & see me.
15: 
16:  I've written a little thing on Conscription which is coming out in the
17:  Labour Leader I think. I see Portugal is joining in, & America will
18:  join in presently. I'm getting stiffened out with this war. I knew it
19:  would be Hell when it started. But I really didn't think it was going
20:  to be like this. The beloved Lilly has let me use her bedroom, & your
21:  picture hangs at the head of the bed. I'm going to lunch with dear
22:  Lady Low tomorrow. Don't you think there's a little likeness between
23:  her & Lilly? They might be sisters. I like them better than any new
24:  people I've met since I came to England.
25: 
26:  Much love
27:  from Olive
28: 
29:  Its rather terrible the way they bully these poor conscientious
30:  objectors. As soon as I'm better I'm going to go & watch the cases. I
31:  suppose you are busy in your part of the world. Remember you we are
32:  fighting for Freedom, & small peoples, & against militaryism & this is
33:  what we ?we got.
34: 

Notation
The 'little thing' Schreiner had written is 'On "conscientious objectors"' Labour Leader 16 March 1916 (see also Appendix H, (ed) S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner (1924) The Letters of Olive Schreiner London: Fisher Unwin).

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Edward Carpenter SMD 30/32/u
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	16 March 1916
Address From	Alexi, The Park, Hampstead, London
Address To	Millthorpe, Holmesfield, Sheffield
Who To	Edward Carpenter
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 Edward Carpenter, 16 March 1916, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  Alexi
2:  Hampstead
3:  March 16th 1916
4: 
5:  Dear Edward
6: 
7:  It was nice to get your letter. Oh it is so good being here. I wrote
8:  another little thing called "Give unto Caesar" - which is coming out
9:  in the Peace & War. I am going to try & go on with the little book I
10:  began writing in Wales but I have not been able to touch since.
11: 
12:  Have you heard that poor Edith Ellis is so ill; a nervous & mental
13:  breakdown. I got a very sad letter from Havelock. I have always feared
14:  this for her. It is the worst of all the troubles that can come in
15:  life.
16: 
17:  I will send you a copy of Peace & War if you don't take it. Its only a
18:  tiny thing I've written a few lines. I should be so happy if I could
19:  get my little book finished. There are things you feel you must say.
20: 
21:  Yes Lilly Batthyany is a beloved soul & I am so fond of her son Jack
22:  who is spending a few days here. He's going to a farm in Hampshire.
23: 
24:  The worst of publishing things in these little socialist & other
25:  papers is that the people you want to see them don't see them it's
26:  only the already converted, & papers like the Nation & the Statesman
27:  are afraid to take them!
28: 
29:  Good bye dear Edward.
30: 
31:  How finely Liebknicht & some of the Germans are standing out. There's
32:  a little handful of us in all nations.
33: 
34:  Olive
35: 

Notation
The 'little thing' called 'Give unto Caesar' is: "Give Unto Caesar -" War & Peace vol 3, no 31, April 1916, p.106. The 'little book' that Schreiner began in Wales is the never completed 'The Dawn of Civilization'.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/1
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	After Start: 1884 ; Before End: 1889
Address From	na
Address To
Who To	Havelock Ellis
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 Havelock Ellis, 1884, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This page, probably once attached to a letter, has no associated envelope or other means of dating it except that the writing seems to belong to Schreiner's mid-life.

1:  1
2:  8 Far away, where the tempest plays,
3:  6 Over the dreary seas,
4:  7 Sail on still with a steady will,
5:  6 On-ward before the breeze.
6: 
7:  2
8:  9 On, onwards yet, still our hearts forget
9:  7 The loves that we leave behind,
10:  11 Till the memories dear ^that^ thrill in our ear
11:  7 Flew past like the whistling wind.
12: 
13:  3
14:  7 Let them come, sweet thoughts of home
15:  7 And voices we loved of old;
16:  7 What care we that sail a sea
17:  7 And bound for a land of gold!
18: 
19:  4
20:  10 Treasures there are that are lovelier far
21:  8 Than the flash of a maiden's eye;
22:  8 Jewels bright in the purple light
23:  8 That crimsons the evening sky.
24: 
25:  5
26:  9 Crowns that gleam like a fairy dream,
27:  6 Treasures of price untold -
28:  9 And we are bound of that charméd ground
29:  7 8 We sail for the land of gold.
30: 
31:  I have written it out for you but it seems to be a funny irregular
32:  meter that no one could sing. I'm not sure at all that it is as it was
33:  in the book where I read it, I was such a little child & I may have
34:  made additions of my own. I'm so fond of it. Be sure you notice the
35:  accent over the "charmed"
36: 
37:  O.S
38: 
39: 
40: 
41: 

Notation
The verse Schreiner quotes is W.E. Littlewood's poem 'The Land of Gold'.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/2
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	25 November 1880
Address From	Lily Kloof, Halesowen, Eastern Cape
Address To
Who To	Lady Superintendent of Nurses, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, but sent to Havelock Ellis
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 Lady Superintendent of Nurses, Edinburgh Royal Infirmary, but sent to Havelock Ellis, 25 November 1880, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. Schreiner provided Havelock Ellis at an unknown date with her application to the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. It is not known how this typescript of the application form came to be made; however, the original form was sent to Schreiner?s friend Dr John Brown in Burnley, who sent it on to the ERI, so the typescript is likely to predate her friendship with Ellis.

1:  Edinburgh Royal Infirmary 25-11-80
2: 
3:  N.B. This paper to be filled in (in the Candidate's own handwriting)
4:  and sent to the Lady Superintendent of Nurses, Edinburgh Royal
5:  Infirmary.
6: 
7:  Questions to be answered by Candidate
8: 
9:  1. Name in full and present address of Candidate.
10:  ^Olive Emelie Albertina Schreiner
11:  Lily Kloof, Cradock, Cape of Good Hope.^
12: 
13:  2. Are you a single woman or widow *The marriage certificate will be
14:  required.
15:  ^Single^
16: 
17:  3. Your present occupation of employment, also, if a widow, the former
18:  occupation of your husband
19:  ^Governess.^
20: 
21:  4. Age last birthday, and date and place of birth.
22:  ^25. Born at Wittersberg, South Africa, March 24th. 1855.^
23: 
24:  5. Height?
25:  ^Five feet.^
26:  Weight?
27:  ^There are no scales here. Weight, probably about 110.^
28: 
29:  6. Where educated?
30:  ^At home.^
31: 
32:  7. Of what religious denomination? Name and address of Clergyman or
33:  Minister who knows you.
34:  ^Free thinker. Father, Lutheran. Rev. W. Caldecott, East London, South
35:  Africa.^
36: 
37:  8. Can you read and write well?
38:  ^Yes.^
39: 
40:  9. Are you strong and healthy? and have you always been so.
41:  ^Yes. Was delicate at one time, but have wholly recovered.^
42: 
43:  10. If a widow, have you children? How many? Their ages. How are they
44:  provided for?
45: 
46:  11. Where (if any) was your last situation? How long were you in it.
47:  ^Ratelhoek. Dis. Tarkastad. Three years.^
48: 
49:  12. What is the name and occupation of your father, or, if not living,
50:  your mother.
51:  ^Father - Lutheran Missionary - dead. Mother, living on her income.
52:  Grahamstown, South Africa.^
53: 
54:  13. The names in full, and address of two persons to be referred to?
55:  State how long each has known you. If previously employed, one of
56:  these must be the last employer.
57:  ^Dr. ?H. Pearson, Seymour, South Africa. Has known me 5 years
58:  Christoffel Christian Fouche, Esq., Lily Kloof, Cradock, South Africa.
59:  has known me 8 years.^
60: 
61:  14. Name and address of your Medical attendant.
62:  ^I have none.^
63: 
64:  15. Have you read, and do you clearly understand the regulations.
65:  ^yes^
66: 
67:  I declare the above statement to be correct.
68:  Date ^Lily Kloof, Nov. 25th. 1880.^
69:  Signed ^Olive Emilie ^^Albertina^^ Schreiner^ Candidate.
70: 
71: 
72: 

Notation
Schreiner's responses to the questions asked on the form from the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary strain at the boundaries of 'letterness', but are included for the sake of completeness.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/3
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	Friday 12 December 1885
Address From	9 Blandford Square, Paddington, London
Address To	3 Norwood Villas, Earlswood, Surrey
Who To	Havelock Ellis
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 88

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, 12 December 1885, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on its front. Schreiner was resident in Blandford Square from the end of November 1885 to mid January 1886, when she left London for the Isle of Wight.

1:  Friday night
2: 
3:  I feel so tired to night. Have been crying I thought I'd forgotten how
4:  to cry.
5: 
6:  Good night my comfort
7: 
8:  Olive
9: 
10:  I shall come to New Life. It would be nice if Page could come.
11: 
12:  O.S
13: 
14: 

Notation
This letter is written in the margins of a letter from Havelock Ellis, as follows:

My dear Miss Schreiner

Mr Malloy unreadable asked me to forward you / enclosed card. I am going & Miss ?C. Haddon & Mrs ?Castlebury are to be there. She has a flat near the B. Museum. If you thought of going I would arrange to meet you, we could call for you or we could drive there together. I think you do not patronise unreadable at that ?corner omnibuses are very empty, & Bayswater ones are very nice. They leave for town at unreadable street from which Gt. Ormond St. is only a few minutes walk.

Will you come to / theatre some night next week? Send me a card soon.

Yours ever truly
& affectionately.

27 Perham Road
S.W.
Dec. 10

Do not put West Kensington on yr letter - S.W. is unreadable & safer from unreadable post.

The version of Schreiner's letter in Cronwright-Schreiner (1924) is incorrect in a range of respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/5
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	30 June 1912
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To
Who To	Havelock Ellis
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 Havelock Ellis, 30 June 1912, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections.

1:  De Aar
2:  June 30th 1912
3: 
4:  Dear old Boy
5: 
6:  Thanks for your letter. Of course each person's "diary works" (I mean
7:  simple, spontaneous, straight forward records of what one sees, feels,
8:  & does & thinks) will differ with the individuality of the person. The
9:  charm is that it is an expression of their individuality. A guide book
10:  has no charm because it expresses no individuality it is just a
11:  collection of facts. If Barrow writes a book the thing his
12:  individuality notes are names of mountains & rivers, language, words,
13:  also gypsies, tramps thieves & scenery to a small extent, with a word
14:  picture of his mind thought & feeling. When Darwin writes he notes all
15:  plants, animals, scientific speculation turn up in his mind at every
16:  moment, nature impresses him with great cosmic feelings: his books are
17:  greater than Barrow's because a greater soul - but Barrow's also have
18:  their value & charm.
19: 
20:  You could write a book most engaging & splendid if you wrote more as
21:  you write letters & more spontaneously. Any one of your letters to me
22:  where you've told me just a little about your travels in Spain say, is
23:  worth the whole of your book. The letters live, the book seems
24:  artificial. You express in the book what you've really seen & thought
25:  but in a stiff artificial manner. There is not enough of yourself in
26:  all of your later writing. If I were very ill & you knew that my life
27:  depended on q my being amused & interest, & to help me you wrote an
28:  account of your a fortnight spent in Paris, just who you saw where you
29:  went & felt interest, what you felt about your food & your room: & how
30:  the pictures impressed you, it would no doubt splendid. Your short
31:  hurried letters ^even^ are 100 times more interesting than your books.
32: 
33:  I could write the most marvelous books in that way, compared to which
34:  all my other books are nothing. I do see the actual world about me so
35:  intensely the men & women I meet print themselves on me, agonize me if
36:  they are antipathetic, give me bliss if there are beautiful.
37: 
38:  The sc atmospheric effects of every day I note intensely the changes
39:  in the sky the weather the scene: all nature is immensely important.
40:  My feeling to this awful sandy desert, the strange passionate love I
41:  feel for the pepper-trees I have planted, & especially one rose bush
42:  that I nurture & care for before my door. My difficulty is that I dare
43:  not write the truth! I would be so afraid of paining human beings.
44:  Character! character! character! is what cuts deep into me. The
45:  character people I meet on the train, of the people living in de Aar,
46:  of my different servants - I could write books about them alone - &
47:  most easily. But dare I, with my terror of inflicting pain? - I can't,
48:  that's why I can't write my life! My
49: 
50:  You
51: 
52:  You who are not so terribly moved by all persons you come into contact
53:  with - could write much more easily just what you feel & think about
54:  the things you see. Of course you do lack descriptive power with
55:  regard to material things. I doubt whether in a few lines you could
56:  make me see an old ruin on a hill as Barrow does so that I actually
57:  see it. He was of course born the artist. - that is what the matter
58:  with him - unlovable, in many respects an ignorant & narrow man - he
59:  was an artist! The few right words in which to pain a thing he saw
60:  always came to him, because he saw so clearly & intensely. Life was
61:  always shaping itself into pictures to him. But you could write most
62:  valuable books if they were more like your letters. There are such
63:  wonderful little touches - so often in your conversation - now & then
64:  in your letters, in which you throw a whole world into a short
65:  critical or descriptive sentence - t as where you once said of Karl
66:  Pearson's wife when you first met her that she seemed a good sort of
67:  woman, "but the kind of person who would finish off a man!" C I can't
68:  write more now.
69: 
70:  Cron is still away at the Victoria Falls. He returns the middle of
71:  this week. The weather is a little better, the sunshine through my
72:  window is dancing on the sheet as I write.
73: 
74:  Things in South Africa grow darker & darker. Sauer & Burton the two
75:  only liberal men on the native question have been turned out of their
76:  offices in the ministry, & the most bigoted, narrow native hater in
77:  South Africa Hertzog put in as minister of native affairs. There are
78:  terrible things coming soon
79: 
80:  ^in this poor accursed land. We have also passed a bill for forced
81:  conscription.
82: 
83:  Olive^
84: 
85: 

Notation
The books referred to are: George Borrow (1857) The Romany Rye London: John Murray and (1851) Lavengro: The Scholar Gypsy London: John Murray.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/6
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	Wednesday 16 July 1884
Address From	Bole Hill, Wirksworth
Address To	24 Thornsett Road, South Penge Park, London
Who To	Havelock Ellis
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 31-3

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, 16 July 1884, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter has been derived from the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on its front.

1:  Bole Hill
2:  Wirksworth
3:  Wednesday
4: 
5:  Thank you for the Law Breaker. Can I keep that article of yours till
6:  you come because I want us to talk over it? I will send it if you want
7:  it, but you must bring it with you when you come. I want you when you
8:  come here to go for some very long walks alone. I think it will rest
9:  you so. I am so thankful you can stay a fortnight.
10: 
11:  Speaking of the effect sexual feeling has on the mind, it is very
12:  clearly proved in the case of women. I must make more inquiries among
13:  other women, my friends who will have noticed & been able to analyze
14:  their feelings. With myself while I am unwell every month my feelings
15:  are particularly sensitive & strong. A little word that would not pain
16:  me at another time causes me acute agony. I can not help feeling, & a
17:  little word of tenderness is so precious to me (Especially the man who
18:  loves you ought to be tender with you then). The time of greatest &
19:  most wonderful mental activity is just after, & perhaps the last two
20:  days of the time ^too^. My mind is a I was unwell last week; & though
21:  now my chest is so unreadable troublesome I can be on the sofa half
22:  asleep, & the thoughts are all continually to crowding in on me
23:  unreadable. Last night it suddenly flashed into me, the unreadable ^solution^
24:  of all my difficulties with "From man to man". It has been brooding in
25:  the back ground of my mind these many days, & now it has suddenly come.
26:  I shall have no more difficulty with it, it is as clear as day light.
27:  I have got what I wanted. It is so splendid, I mean this feeling is, I
28:  get so excited I don't know what to do.
29: 
30:  But to go back to the sexual feeling. Of course one may easily
31:  exaggerate what I have been talking about, but there is no doubt there
32:  is some truth in it. Eleanor Marx the only woman I have spoken to on
33:  the subject feels much the same. My acquisitive power, my power of
34:  learning, is not at all weaker just at the time, but my feelings are
35:  so strong. Ask Louie how she feels. I am going to ask Mrs Walter &
36:  some of my intimate friends. This subject in interesting, because as
37:  far as the power of the purely physical-sexual extends, so far must
38:  the power of ?bra the mental-sexual extend. If the physical
39:  feelings extend their power over a certain portion of the soul, then
40:  the relationship between man & woman will be able to work upon the
41:  same portion. Do you carefully observe (I mean un consciously, I
42:  always look at it myself unconsciously ^don't you?^) the ?rebel
43:  interaction of your manly upon your mental nature.
44: 
45:  I should like to know the man's side of the question too. I should
46:  think the relationship must be always ^almost^ as close. Look at the
47:  effect of celibacy on monks & hermits, &c.
48: 
49:  Yes, you must never look any one in the face, ah? I wouldn't
50:  understand it ^at first^. I think what I called that glorious look in
51:  eye in your eyes was just the once or twice when you looked really
52:  into mine. They were godlike. What is rather funny is that some years
53:  ago I never looked at anyone in the eyes; I couldn't. I had a cousin
54:  who used to hate me & wasn't kind to me, & she used to say that I
55:  never looked at anyone, & that that was why she couldn't bear me. I
56:  wonder if you will change like I have, & look people full in the face
57:  like I do now. And I used to be so reserved, & secretive without any
58:  reason for it; I'm not like that now.
59: 
60:  If I talked to any one I used to turn my face half away from them. I
61:  couldn't help it. I'm glad you turn away your face from people &
62: 
63:  ^look down I don't think you will always.
64: 
65:  I should like to send you some day some letters of my mother's to read.
66:  My grandfather's name was Lyndall. I think I told you about him
67:  though I've written to my mother to ask her about the Olivers. I
68:  should like to have your blood in me, shouldn't you like to have mine.
69: 
70:  I liked Under the Greenwood Tree. Tell me all you can about Hardy.
71: 
72:  Good bye, my boy-brother.
73: 
74:  Olive^
75: 
76:  ^Is the London Review published in India?^
77: 

Notation
The final insertion is on the envelope. The books referred to are: James Hinton The Law Breaker and The Coming of the Law (ed. M. Hinton) London: Kegan Paul & Co; Thomas Hardy (1872) Under the Greenwood Tree London: Tinsley Brothers. Schreiner's request to keep an article by Ellis may refer to: Havelock Ellis (1883) 'Thomas Hardy's Novels' Westminster Review no.119: 334-64. The version of this letter in Cronwright-Schreiner (1924) is incorrect in a range of respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/7
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	Friday 19 July 1884
Address From	Bolehill, Wirksworth, Derbyshire
Address To	24 Thornsett Road, South Penge Park, London
Who To	Havelock Ellis
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 33; Rive 1987: 47

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, 19 July 1884, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on its front. Schreiner stayed at Bolehill near Wirksworth from early to late July 1885, moved to Buxton for about ten days, and then returned to Bole Hill from mid August to early September 1884.

1:  Friday
2: 
3:  I thought I shouldn't to write to you today, but I find a kind of need.
4: 
5:  Did you ever read that passage in Shelly's letters where he talks
6:  about genius (I think he repeats it from another book.) that Genius
7:  does not invent, it perceives. I think that ^this^ is so won-derfully
8:  true & more true the more one looks at it. It agrees with the true
9:  fact that you noticed the other day, that men of genius are always
10:  childlike. A child sees everything, looks straight at it, examines it
11:  without any preconceived idea; most people after they are about eleven
12:  or twelve quiet lose this power, they see everything through a few
13:  pre-conceived ideas which hang like a veil between them & the outer
14:  world.
15: 
16:  By the bye (this doesn't bear directly on that) did you ever do what I
17:  was fond of doing when I was a child, I used to call it "Looking at
18:  things really"? Look at your hand, for instance, make an effort of
19:  mind, & dis-associate from it every preconceived idea, for instance
20:  that it is your hand, that it is part of a human body, &c &c. Look at
21:  it simply as an object which strikes the eye; you will be surprised
22:  who how new, & strange, & funny it looks, as though you had never seen
23:  it before. It requires some effort of mind of course, & one can't do
24:  it if one is hurried & talking, it takes some time. I used to do it
25:  often in church to pass away the time. It can be done with the other
26:  senses too, of course. I have often done it with speaking. Listen to
27:  people talking as though you didn't understand what the words meant, &
28:  didn't or that the sound came from human voices. Listen to it just as
29:  a noise striking the ear. It is utterly different from what one
30:  fancies. This isn't very interesting though.
31: 
32:  I have been reading my Emerson just now. You will do me great service
33:  if you help me to read French, it will open a whole new field of books
34:  to me.
35: 
36:  Tomorrow at twelve I must walk down to Wirksworth to meet Mrs Walter
37:  at 1.We shall talk a great deal about Hinton. I mean to try & explain
38:  Hinton to her & make her ^understand him^. I don't think she sees him
39:  rightly. I will tell you what she says & ^what^ I say about it. How
40:  beautiful about your visit to Shields.
41: 

Notation
For Shelley's letters, see Percy Bysshe Shelley (1840) Essays, Letters From Abroad, Translations and Fragments London: Edward Moxon. Rive's version of this letter has been misdated, omits part of the letter, and is also in a number of respects incorrect. Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version is incorrect in a range of respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/8
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	14 May 1886
Address From	St Dominic?s Convent, Mutrix Road, Kilburn
Address To	98 Earlsbrook Road, Earlswood, Surrey
Who To	Havelock Ellis
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 98-9; Rive 1987: 79

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, 14 May 1886, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on its front. Schreiner lived at St Dominic's Convent in Kilburn from early April to mid May 1886.

1:  My Harry
2: 
3:  I am going to go tomorrow to the Academy for a couple of hours. On Sat
4:  morning I leave for Harrow. Address will just be
5:  Convent
6:  Harrow-on-the-Hill
7:  Nr. London.
8: 
9:  I don't quite know what's the matter with me, I'm so much knocked down.
10:  Will my book ever ever ever be done? One thing every word of it is
11:  truth to me, & more & more so as the book goes not. It could not be
12:  otherwise that is all that can be said for it. One thing I am glad of
13:  is that it becomes less & less what you call "art" as it goes on. My
14:  first crude conceptions are always what you call "art", as they become
15:  more & more living & real they become what I call higher art, but what
16:  you call no "art" at all. I quite understand what you mean but I
17:  cannot think that your use of the word "art" in that sense is right i.e.
18:  not misleading & therefore untrue. If I understand what you mean
19:  Wilhelm Meister is not art, ^one of^ Balzac's conser novels is.
20:  Wilhelm Meister is one of the most immortal deathless ?action production
21:  of the greatest of the world's artists, the result of twenty years
22:  labour, worth any six of Balzacs. novels, great & glorious as Balzac
23:  is; yet if you were writing a review of it you would, ridiculous as it
24:  would seem, be obliged to call it "not art".
25: 
26:  You say, "I will call art, only that artistic creation in which I can
27:  clearly see the artist manufacturing the parts & piecing them together;
28:  what ever where I cannot see that, though the thing be organic, true
29:  inevitable like a work of God's, I will not call it art. I must see
30:  the will shaping it: (of course there always has been a will shaping
31:  it whether it is visible or not) or I will not call it art.
32: 
33:  ^This of course is not in justification of my method, but touches what
34:  seems to me a weakness or shallowness in your mode of criticism. It is
35:  very valuable that the two kinds of art should be distinguished but
36:  not that the one should be called art & the other not art. Of the two
37:  it would be better to call the one artificial art & the other real art
38:  - but that would not be just. I should rather call the one organic,
39:  the other inorganic, of the one you think of as a thing made, the
40:  other as a thing that grew.^
41: 

Notation
Schreiner's 'Will my book ever ever ever be done?' commenty concerns From Man to Man. The Goethe book referred to is: Johan Wolfgang von Goethe (1871) Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship London: Chapman & Hall. Rive's version omits part of this letter and is also in a number of respects incorrect. Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version is incorrect in various ways.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/9
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	31 May 1886
Address From	The Convent, Harrow, London
Address To	98 Earlsbrook Road, Earlswood, Surrey
Who To	Havelock Ellis
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 101

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, 31 May 1886, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on its front. The final insertion is on the envelope. Schreiner lived at the Convent in Harrow from late May to late September 1886.

1:  Havelock
2: 
3:  I've just come back from seeing M. Harkness. Oh, the joy to get back &
4:  here again. I could have cried for joy when I got out here at the
5:  station & walked up the hill. I don't know how it is I have been able
6:  to live among the rush so long; a little more & I should have broken
7:  forever. Oh this blessed, blessed solitude ^& stillness.^
8: 
9:  My darling boy, I wish I could help you. If I had not my work I could
10:  be like I was. What you, & my brother & Mrs Walters & Mrs Brown sy &
11:  Dr Donkin ^& K Pearson, & my Mother,^ say, "You are changed, you are
12:  changed," means simply that I am not living in the world that
13:  surrounds me but in my work. You can't understand & there is no use in
14:  my saying anything on the matter ever to you. K Pearson has written me
15:  such a pained letter, because I said I didn't want to answer his
16:  letters. Sometime I feel inclined to swear a big oath, & throw all my
17:  M.SS in the fire, & say "Here I am, I shall live as I have lived the
18:  last three years, never in my work, never conscious of myself, but
19:  through & in the people I love." My heart is sore sorrowful about it.
20:  And what after all is my work worth that I should sacrifice every
21:  thing to it, that I should torture myself like this.
22: 
23:  I won't say any more on this subject again to you or any no one. Good
24:  bye, my own darling. I wish I were dead. But tomorrow I will forget
25:  all of you, even my brother, & work. I wish I could help you my
26:  darling.
27: 
28:  Oh am I right in trying to get back into my old state & work. Deep in
29:  my heart I feel that I am, but doubts will come sometimes & I hate
30:  myself so I wish I was dead. I wish so you would come & see me here.
31:  This is such a beautiful place. I wish you would come some day about 3
32:  o'clock. You have been more help to me than you can ever know my
33:  Havelock.
34: 
35:  Olive
36: 
37:  ^My darling Havelock I do love you. Can't you believe it?^
38: 
39:  ^This letter isn't nice but I'm so worn. This morning my brother writes
40:  that as he knows I won't take the trouble to answer him he sends a
41:  card with his address on which I can return to let him know I've got
42:  his letter. I'm writing to Miss Haddon to tell her I can't come she
43:  would only say I was changed.^
44: 

Notation
Cronwright-Schreiner?s (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in various respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/10
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	Monday 21 September 1886
Address From	The Convent, Harrow
Address To	98 Earlsbrook Road, Earlswood, Surrey
Who To	Havelock Ellis
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 Havelock Ellis, 21 September 1886, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on its front.

1:  The Convent
2:  Harrow
3:  Monday night
4: 
5:  I am looking out for a word from you. I've been out to the post today
6:  & feel better. I mean to set my teeth & work tomorrow. I must at least
7:  finish Jan van der Linden's wife if I don't finish anything else. I am
8:  going into Town as soon as I am able to see if I can find cheap
9:  lodgings anywhere. I mean to try round Manchester Square.
10: 
11:  If I finish Jan & get £5 for it I'll come in. I love the story. I
12:  haven't written it the least bit for money other wise I couldn't sell
13:  it. Has Chapman paid you yet? I am quite sure he never will.
14: 
15:  I have just heard of a new villany of Aveling. He did poor Mrs
16:  ?Guiggenberger out of £10 or so, & she is very poor. He & my Chapman
17:  are just of the same kind. I think there are many capitalist sweaters
18:  who are not so bad because they do it unconsciously.
19: 
20:  Good night my comrade
21:  Olive
22: 

Notation
The 'Jan' which Schreiner writes about finishing is the never completed or else destroyed 'Jan van der Linden's Wife'.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/11
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	3 November 1888
Address From	Alassio, Italy
Address To	98 Earlsbrook Road, Earlswood, Surrey
Who To	Havelock Ellis
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 145-6

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, 3 November 1888, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The address this letter was sent to is provided by an attached envelope.

1:  Alassio
2:  Italy
3:  Nov 3 / 1888
4: 
5:  Please put 3/- of stamps in the enclosed letter & post it. Wilde only
6:  sent me one copy of W's W.
7: 
8:  I long to be at my story making. It's a glorious day here after the
9:  pouring rain of yesterday.
10: 
11:  I'm not like old Tolstoy!!! Everything he teaches according to PMG is
12:  what I believe. His falseness lies in this, instead of saying simply
13:  "I see these things as truth," he wants to force them into the world
14:  under the old name of Christ. ^If^ Wwhat Jesus saw was truth, & in so
15:  far as it was every ^one^ who pierces as deeply into the laws of human
16:  nature & life as he did will find again.
17: 
18:  Be Neither Christ on Tolstoy nor any one of us now living has yet seen
19:  & preached that doctrine of love & forgiveness as it will be preached
20:  in ages to come.
21: 
22:  O.S
23: 
24:  ^It is the true light that lighteth every man that cometh into the
25:  world. You have never understood the strife & agony of these last
26:  years, it has not been to forgive, it has not been magnanimously to
27:  over look that is easy enough It is to love. If there be one soul you
28:  cannot love then you are lost.^
29: 
30:  ^Please buy & send me a bible, as like my old one in size & print as
31:  you can. Its was one of those cheap bibles published by the ^British &^
32:  Foreign Bible Society. Not with the very fine print.^
33: 
34:  I am always quoting from the bible sometimes for the devil's own
35:  purposes & I find as the years pass my memory sometimes wavers with
36:  regard to an exact ^wording of a^ passage.
37: 
38:  O.S
39: 

Notation
The final insertion is on a torn-off attached fragment of paper. Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in a range of respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/12
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	18 October 1886
Address From	9 Blandford Square, Paddington, London
Address To	98 Earlsbrook Road, Earlswood, Surrey
Who To	Havelock Ellis
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 Havelock Ellis, 18 October 1886, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date has been derived from the postmark on an attached envelope, although this is not fully legible; the envelope also provides the address the letter was sent to. The Howard Hinton bigamy trial in which Mrs Weldon was correspondent took place in late October 1886, providing the year the letter was written. Schreiner was resident in Blandford Square from early October to mid December 1886, when she left London for Europe.

1:  This trial affair is so terrible; they are all so false. What a
2:  terrible deadly thing that Hinton theory is, like a ?upas tree
3:  blighting all it comes in contact with because it is false to human
4:  nature.
5: 
6:  I saw John Falk on Friday. I am going to get Mrs Weldon to stay here
7:  till the trial & I am going to to sit with her at hi it.
8: 
9:  Do you know I can't help hating Mrs Howard Hinton. She is the only one
10:  I can't feel sorry for. Poor Howard looked so beautiful when he went
11:  into the prisoner's dock. They say he will likely only get a few days
12:  -& then
13: 
14:  ^I can't think about anything else.
15: 
16:  Olive^
17: 

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/13
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	6 April 1889
Address From	Paris
Address To	98 Earlsbrook Road, Earlswood, Surrey
Who To	Havelock Ellis
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 160-1; Rive 1987: 154

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, 6 April 1889, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on the front.

1:  Paris
2: 
3:  You quite intentionally misunderstand me in every thing, or, sometimes
4:  I think are we grown so wide apart that no understanding is possible
5:  between us. As the strongest personal feelings my nature has known are
6:  gloriously "funny" & "absurd" to you, & my ideas, which after all are
7:  my real life dearer much to me than any person or than my self simply
8:  bore you, so even such a common place remark as that in my letter to
9:  my brother you willfully misunderstand or can't understand. No human
10:  creature's ^feel feelings^ could possibly be further ^removed^ with
11:  respect to my artistic work - not of course the scientific - than mine
12:  from George Elliots. Her great desire was to teach, mine to express my
13:  self for my self & to my self alone The thought that hundreds of
14:  thousands will read my work does offend me & hinder me, not because I
15:  wish to teach them, but because terrible as it is to show them my work
16:  at all, the thought of throwing it to them to be trodden under foot is
17:  double desecrating of it. I'm almost beginning to hate my Prelude now
18:  because three or four people have looked at it. & if many more do I
19:  shall throw it into the fire. If you sermonized me on the wickedness
20:  of not caring & sharing my work with other people, you would be much
21:  nearer the truth.
22: 
23:  The best stories & dreams I have had nothing would induce me to write
24:  at all because I couldn't bear one person to read them. As for its
25:  being a new development its a feeling that's rather growing weaker,
26:  because as a child if Will or anyone got hold of a scrap I'd written I
27:  tore up the whole thing at once. It was like a knife in my heart
28:  to-day when I saw an African Farm stuck up in a window. I get to loath
29:  it when I think of how many people have read it. Do you think I could
30:  write Bertie's death scene, do you think I could show all the inmost
31:  working of Rebekah's heart if, I realized that anyone would ever read it.
32: 
33:  If God were to put me alone on a star & say I & the star should be
34:  born up at last & nothing be left, I should make stories all the time
35:  just the same. Its not that I want my story to be worthy of the people,
36:  but that I can't bear to desecrate the thing I love by showing it to
37:  them in a form they can't understand. I can't tell you how sorry I am
38:  I showed a Ruined Chapel to any one; it's so beautiful to me & no one
39:  understands it. ^I'm going to print a little allegory in next
40:  Fortnightly. But I don't want to hear what ^^any^^ one thinks of it. I
41:  know what I know.^
42: 
43:  //I am wonderfully better since I have made up my mind to come to
44:  England. It was that, I feel now; that I was really wanting: & the
45:  strain of resisting it that made me so tired.
46: 
47:  I go to the ?Valls every day. I'm quite "the oldest inhabitant". Nelly
48:  Pruse is lovely. After Alice Corthorn she's the most "native to me"
49:  girl I know. She's very like Alice, only she's artistic instead of
50:  scientific. When I'm in England I'm going to write her to come & stay
51:  with me, & you'll see how nice she is. I've not quite made up my mind
52:  about hospital. ^I'll see when I come.^
53: 
54:  //No, I'm not going to buy shoes & stockings. I've plenty with those
55:  two pairs & I've had mine my old boots resoled. There's not any hurry
56:  with the other money. A I've plenty now. It rains here every day. I've
57:  been once to the Louvre but not anywhere else.
58: 
59:  Goodbye.
60:  Olive
61: 
62:  I've got a letter ^from Mrs Cobb^
63: 
64:  ^Allice will send you Mrs Robert's letter. I'll leave this open till
65:  tomorrow so that I can put Mrs Rob Roberts's answer in, as to whether
66:  he has the rooms or not.^
67: 

Notation
The 'Prelude' that Schreiner refers to is in From Man to Man and Bertie and Rebekah are characters in this novel. The 'little allegory' was in fact not published in the Fortnightly Review because of its length. See "The sunlight lay across my bed: Part I - Hell" New Review Vol 1, no 11, April 1890, pp.300-309; and "The sunlight lay across my bed: Part II - Heaven", New Review Vol 1, no 12, May 1890, pp.423-431. "In a Ruined Chapel" was published in Dreams. Rive's version of this letter has been misdated, omits part of the letter, and is also in a number of respects incorrect. Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version is incorrect in various respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/14
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	Friday 11 September 1914
Address From	30 St Mary Abbotts Terrace, Kensington, London
Address To	The Old House, Speen, Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire
Who To	Havelock Ellis
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 338

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 September 1914, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on its front.

1:  30 St Mary Abbott's Terrace
2:  Kensington
3:  Friday
4: 
5:  Dear old Havelock
6: 
7:  I went to Eastbourne yesterday. It was too sad.
8: 
9:  I came back in the evening. All the ghosts of my dead youth sat about
10:  me. The grave is on a Hill side from the town.
11: 
12:  I am going down to Margate & Ramsgate tomorrow to try & find a room
13:  there.
14: 
15:  It seems they are going to begin attacking the Germans in South Africa,
16:  the farmers who have never done anything to us, who were so kind to
17:  our prisoners when they escaped to Germany. There seems to me to be no
18:  gratitude in the world; no remembrance of the past.
19: 
20:  I may yet get my little flat in Chelsea but it can't be for two weeks.
21: 
22:  I hope Edith is better.
23: 
24:  Olive
25: 
26:  ^Do you see the Labour Leader? Its the only paper that is standing out
27:  The other papers all refused to take Vernon Lee's & Bertrand Russels
28:  articles.
29: 
30:  Why has one always to stand alone? Why can one never go with the tide
31:  of the mob?^
32: 

Notation
Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in a range of respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/15
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	Monday 3 August 1914
Address From	30 St Mary Abbotts Terrace, Kensington, London
Address To	14 Dover Mansions, Canterbury Road, Brixton, London
Who To	Havelock Ellis
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 337

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, 3 August 1914, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date of this letter is provided by the postmark on an attached envelope, with the address it was sent to on its front.

1:  30 St Mary Abbott's Terrace
2:  Kensington
3:  Monday
4: 
5:  Dear Havelock,
6: 
7:  Arrived at midnight last night after a most awful journey of 15 hour
8:  from Amsterdam. It was the last trains taking foreigners. Hundreds of
9:  men women & children in the boat fleeing - people just lay abut on
10:  the deck in the wet when there was no more room in the cabins & below.
11:  The sea was wild & the spray poured over the decks. I shall never
12:  forget it. Then there was a wild fight for ^seats in the^ trains!
13: 
14:  Good bye dear you & Edith I long to see
15:  Olive
16: 
17:  Germany is determined to fight. It is she who is the cause of all. In
18:  Holland they are expecting the Prussians there tomorrow to take the
19:  Hague & the ports. All the soldiers are mobilized, but of course they
20:  can do nothing. War is Hell. They will fight in Africa too.
21: 

Notation
Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in a range of respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/16
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	1906
Address From	Hanover, Northern Cape
Address To
Who To	Havelock Ellis
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 254

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, 1906, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The year and also the place which this fragment of a letter was sent from are provided by Cronwright-Schreiner (1924: 254). The beginning and end are missing.

1:  [page/s missing] harder, or if down below there is the same tenderness
2:  & idealism below the quiet passive surface.
3: 
4:  One thing is beautiful to me is that though my personal life has
5:  become crushed & indifferent to me, I have not lost one little grain
6:  of my faith in the possible beauty & greatness of human nature, the
7:  divine beauty of perfect love, & of truth. I am so absolute certain
8:  that the dream the ideal of beauty & goodness is that towards which
9:  human nature is slowly moving. And life has been very, very, beautiful.
10:  Even the power to heal & repress oneself is beautiful if there is
11:  nothing else. And ones joy in nature & in knowing & trying to
12:  understand has been glorious; & I have had better & more beautiful
13:  friends than any one in the world. Tell me a little about yourself:
14:  not in the "dam'd fine horse" style - really. [page/s missing]
15: 
16:  Olive
17: 
18: 
19: 

Notation
Cronwright-Schreiner’s version of this letter fragment is incorrect in a range of respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/17
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	30 September 1899
Address From	Karree Kloof, Kran Kuil, Northern Cape
Address To
Who To	Havelock Ellis
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 227-8; Rive 1987: 384

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, 30 September 1899, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date has been written on this letter in an unknown hand. Schreiner stayed on a farm near Kran Kuil from late August to mid November 1899. The start of the letter is missing.

1:  [page/s missing] the company. It's very hard to refuse.
2: 
3:  Johannesburg is now practically depopulated, & the women & children
4:  are fleeing out of the Free State also into the Colony. But I have not
5:  the slightest doubt war will spread throughout the whole country.
6: 
7:  You scorn my love for England & English men. Well I have traveled a
8:  bit about the world I have lived in South Africa, 30 out of forty-odd
9:  years of my life, & still the noblest dearest & most beloved humans I
10:  have met remain Englishmen in the main. Not only you & Carpenter & all
11:  the others I personally love & admire, but such men as dear old
12:  General Sir William Butler, who threw up his post here as general in
13:  the British army & has gone home because he said the war would be a
14:  gross immorality, are to me as fine representatives of the race human
15:  as any I am likely to see, according to my view. And this is not
16:  taking into view the great army of the dead from Shakespeare & Milton
17:  to Shelly, Darwin, George Elliot & Browning. An Englishman is like a
18:  Jew he seems to be either Christ or Judas; but on the whole much as I
19:  love all races of men I have yet been thrown into contact with I think
20:  we do pretty well. Not better than other races, but [page/s missing]
21: 
22:  if a cultured person, with any knowledge of human nature!!
23: 
24:  An old Boer woman I once knew after half an hour running down the
25:  English for their pride & selfishness & cruelty, said "And yet, when
26:  you do get an Englishman good he's the ?best on earth."
27: 
28:  However I have written a whole long article almost a book on the
29:  Englishman in Africa which will explain my views. Public affairs are
30:  so bad one can't write of them any more. Dear old Herbert Spencer has
31:  spoken & Morley & other but they have
32: 
33:  ^waited till it was too late. Six months ago it would have saved the
34:  situation.
35: 
36:  Olive^
37: 

Notation
The 'long article almost a book' Schreiner refers to is An English South African’s View of the Situation, originally published in the South African News over three successive days; see 'Words in Season. An English South African's View of the Situation' South African News 1 June 1899 (p.8), 2 June 1899 (p.8) and 3 June 1899 (also p.8). It was also reprinted in a number of other newspapers. It then was published as a pamphlet, then as a book. A second edition of the book was ready but withdrawn from publication with Hodder and Stoughton by Schreiner when the South African War started in October 1899, so as not to profit from this. Rive's version of this letter has been misdated, omits part of the letter, and is also in a number of respects incorrect. Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version is incorrect in various respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/18
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	Thursday June 1911
Address From	Victoria Falls Hotel, Zimbabwe
Address To
Who To	Havelock Ellis
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 301-2

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, June 1911, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date minus the year has been written on this letter in an unknown hand. Schreiner's visit to the Victoria Falls was in early June 1911. The letter is on printed headed notepaper.

1:  Victoria Falls Hotel
2:  Zambesi
3:  S.A.
4:  Thursday
5: 
6:  Dear Havelock boy,
7: 
8:  We leave tomorrow this most lovely & beautiful & wonderful of earthly
9:  sights. No pictures, nothing that has ever been said of it gives the
10:  faintest conception of what this is. The vast "Spirit of the Waters."
11: 
12:  A mile & a quarter of water leaping down into the almighty chasm with
13:  the roar of thunder that sounds for eighteen miles, & which as it
14:  falls leaps up again into the into clouds of white & rainbow tinted
15:  mists 4000 feet high. The colours, the colours, the wild spirits of
16:  the mist it is that that overpowers one & fills one with joy. One
17:  cries but only from happiness. We were nearly all drowned on Tues-day,
18:  the motor boat we were on broke down & we were drifting down onto the
19:  falls. We were only saved by a canoe coming past & going for help to
20:  the landing & calling six more canoes which took us all out & towed
21:  the boat to land. The pluck of all the women & girls except one
22:  miserable old Christian was wonderful. I must tell you all about it
23:  some day. The curious thing is that having been so near death in its
24:  arms instead of making me feel horror of it, seems to draw me so much
25:  nearer it - my falls that I was nearly part of!! I have never loved
26:  any natural phenomena so.
27: 
28:  Olive
29: 
30:  You've no idea what a wild splendid country we pass through coming
31:  here
32: 

Notation
Cronwright-Schreiner's (1924) version of this letter is incorrect in a range of respects.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/19
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Postcard
Letter Date	23 August 1920
Address From	On board ship, Balmoral Castle
Address To	14 Dover Mansions, Canterbury Road, Brixton, London
Who To	Havelock Ellis
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 Havelock Ellis, 23 August 1920, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner postcard, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date is provided by the postmark on this postcard and the address it was sent to and its recipient are on the card. On the front is a black and white picture of the Royal Mail Steamer ‘Balmoral Castle’.

1:  We are nearing Madeira. I have not been sea sick at all. But my heart
2:  is troublesome. Have not lain down since I left England. Will write
3:  from Africa.
4: 

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/20
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Postcard
Letter Date	After Start: December 1886 ; Before End: March 1887
Address From	Montreux, Switzerland
Address To
Who To	Havelock Ellis
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 Havelock Ellis, December 1886, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner postcard, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This postcard does not have a stamp, postmark or address on it. On its front is a sepia-tinted picture of Montreux, Clarens showing buildings at the lake?s edge. Schreiner stayed in Montreux from the end of December 1886 to mid March 1887.

1:  Hotel Roth is the large square house close to the lake with the
2:  brown along the top. I have pricked a hole with m a needle just were
3:  my window is. You will see it if you hold it up to the light. ^I always
4:  walk up & down on the path you on the edge of the lake, going up from
5:  Hotel Roth.^
6: 
7:  ^The house Byron lived in is in the one just behind Hotel Roth. Now
8:  it’s all write with snow. X this spot is the scene of Rousseau’s
9:  novel.^
10: 
11: 

Notation
Schreiner?s final insertion is written on the front of this postcard, in the border of the picture.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/21
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Postcard
Letter Date	7 May 1904
Address From	Cape Town
Address To	Cark's Water, Lelant, Cornwall, England
Who To	Havelock Ellis
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 Havelock Ellis, 7 May 1904, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner postcard, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date is provided by the postmark and the address this postcard was sent to and its recipient are on the card. The picture on the front shows Devil?s Peak and Table Mountain in Cape Town.

1:  The house I am in is more to the right. This is a good view of Cape
2:  Town. The house I am in is over the hill where the photo was taken & I
3:  have this view before me all day.
4: 
5:  Olive
6: 
7: 

Notation

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/22
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Other
Letter Date	October 1884
Address From	St Leonards, East Sussex
Address To
Who To	Havelock Ellis
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 Havelock Ellis, October 1884, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner other, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This is a blank envelope with some pieces of seaweed inside. There is no address, date, stamp or postmark or anything else on the envelope. The date and address have been written on the inside of its flap in an unknown hand.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Havelock Ellis 2006.29/24
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	31 January 1886
Address From	Royal Spa Hotel, Shanklin, Isle of Wight
Address To
Who To	E. Ray Lankester
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 E. Ray Lankester, 31 January 1886, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This letter exists only in the form of a handwritten copy, minus its beginning, made by Havelock Ellis.

1:  To Prof Ray Lanchester from OS
2:  Royal Spa Hotel
3:  Shanklin
4:  31 Jan Feb/86
5: 
6:  ...You say: "It appears to me quite a truth proposition that marriage
7:  is not the natural tendency of man, or rather not a necessary
8:  characteristic of the race". That depends entirely on the definition
9:  one gives to the word marriage, which has half a dozen possible
10:  meanings. If one uses it in the conventional sense as a legal or
11:  religious contract wh. once entered upon cannot be broken at the will
12:  of the parties & wh. public opinion enforces, I consider it as much
13:  doomed as a ship with a hard hole knocked in itsthe bottom of it; it
14:  certainly is not characteristic of the race. But some species of
15:  relationship, other than that of existing forms of prostitution, must
16:  always exist between men & women if the race is to continue & whether
17:  monogamy, polgamy & polysandry it seems equally right to call it
18:  marriage & a necessity of the race. My own view & one wh. I have
19:  arrived at without any bias in its favour is that monogamy not only is
20:  that wh. most ideally satisfies one, but that it is the point towards
21:  wh. we are slowly surely though slowly tending. It seems, from a study
22:  of the wants of human nature, mental & physical, that it is the mode
23:  of relation capable of yielding the largest amount of satisfaction
24:  with the smallest amount of pain to both man & woman & offspring. At
25:  present of course it hardly ever exists, we have ?evil relationships
26:  on the part of the man & thewoman, & where it does exist I thinkit is
27:  certainly vitiated, I think, by the fact that it is not made an end in
28:  itself but subservient to material & other ulterior motives, that its
29:  benificence cannot be judged of. You seem to regard the relation of
30:  one with one as a purely artificial condition, possible only if the
31:  nature of woman has not free play, & if through material necessity she
32:  is driven to depend on man. I believe that the want for this
33:  relationship lies it the very foundation of woman's nature (& I think
34:  also in man's?), that if tomorrow she was free to develop her own
35:  powers in whatever direction nature impelled her & even monetarily
36:  independent of men, then I believe permanent & perfect marriage would
37:  come into existence generally such as you rightly describe as
38:  sometimes existing now "in wh. that man should obtain the very
39:  sweetest kind of service & attention viz. that wh. is bound up with
40:  genuine sexual love. It may not be very intelligent help or it may be
41:  itself of a very high intelligence - that does not much matter - the
42:  great point being that it is happily & gladly rendered & that there is
43:  a feeling that what is given by the woman in her care to the man is
44:  returned by him in his larger but not less genuine care of the woman."
45:  I have quoted the whole of this passage because it expresses so
46:  accurately the ideal of marriage wh. seems to me so seldom attainable
47:  now because women are not free, because that sweet & happily given
48:  service with the pleasure element being delight in bearing pain for
49:  him cannot be there if the man is not the one a woman chooses, but
50:  simply the one who offers her the best means of livelihood. It is
51:  "woman's ?irony?" that she has to sell herself, whether into the
52:  bitter loveless childless deformed untender state of prostitution or
53:  into loveless marriage. It is her right that she should be able to
54:  give herself freely to the man she loves, service for whom &
55:  dependence upon whom in her times of weakness would be sweet &
56:  precious to her instead of bitter. There are some factors you seem
57:  entirely to lose sight of in this man & woman question. There is in
58:  man human nature a desire to give & service service & to become one in
59:  interest with others existing apart from any pecuniary advantages;
60:  this fact has to be recognised & counted with by the student of human
61:  nature exactly as the condition of something or any other material
62:  phenomena & is to be taken ^into^ account by the study of the external
63:  world, or the conclusions become false. You seem to lose sight of this
64:  fact also. There is in woman a peculiar feeling (accounted for in its
65:  origin by physiological conditions I think) given not to men in
66:  general but to the particular man she loves, a feeling that she
67:  desires to look up to & lean on him & that she almost desires to
68:  suffer for him; & that suffering endured for him or through him is not
69:  the same as any other suffering. It is a fact wh. appears to run flat
70:  in the face of many of the received "women's rights" doctrines, but
71:  they will simply have to make room for it. To me it appears a
72:  singularly beneficent instinct considering the amount of suffering
73:  woman has to go through if the race is to continue. I think one sees
74:  the why of its development when one regards the mental as simply a
75:  solution to the physiological condition. There is no doubt it is
76:  intimately connected with sex feeling & that the fact that it is often
77:  strongly shown by little girls to their big brothers only shows that
78:  quite unconsciously sex instinct must be there. I remember when I was
79:  a little child being whipped till I could hardly stand by a big
80:  brother twelve years older than myself whom I worshipped, because I
81:  didn't open a door quickly. If anyone else had done it I would never
82:  have forgiven them to my dying day. But I hadn't the least feeling of
83:  resentment or injustice. I only crept away & felt as if my heart was
84:  broken. When I remember what a wild indomitable child I was & how
85:  fiercely I resented injustice, it stands out to me as a most
86:  remarkable case of instinct over-riding everything. I remember
87:  distinctly that I did not feel the least trace of unlove, only for
88:  weeks when I looked at his hands I used to quiver. I couldn't bear to
89:  think it was they that hurt me. This feeling I believe is lay dormant
90:  in woman, it always exists when she loves a man, but not of course
91:  when she is simply bought by him. The anguish wh. man can inflict on
92:  woman through taking advantage of this instinct is ^simply^ incalculable,
93:  & the feeling appears to increase in intensity as woman advances in
94:  intellectual power, but I have no doubt that on the whole its action
95:  is benificent.
96: 
97:  I doubt whether many men realise at all how great a fact in the life
98:  of woman is played by the longing to find in man an object of worship,
99:  a thing which she can look up to & trust. The Christian religion lived
100:  so long as& died so hard because it held out to woman an ideal man &
101:  said to him live for him, sacrifice yourself for him, he is noble. In
102:  the woman who has parted with Xy the strength has lain in the giving
103:  up this ideal & there is something pathetic in the stirring of passion
104:  with wh. such women turn to the world of men about them to try &
105:  refind it there. It is interesting as showing how distinctly any given
106:  religion is simply the outcome of a want in human nature. You may say
107:  that this desire is simply lunacy & idiocy. Be it so. But it is there
108:  & a fact wh. those who deal with social phenomena have to take into
109:  account. Do you really believe that when at the present day a man gets
110:  that loving tender service from a woman that he buys it from her? Do
111:  you know that if he was stricken down with disease & became dependent
112:  upon her support as a little child, then the full force of her love
113:  would leap out to him for the first time. A man may labour all his
114:  life & spend all his money on women, a wife or otherwise, & in the end
115:  he may never have had an act of true devotion from a woman, never have
116:  possessed one woman. No, by 'God', you can't buy us; if we give
117:  ourselves to you with the money it is still only a gift - you can buy
118:  nothing but the shells.
119: 
120:  If you want to be tender & helpful to us & to feel your power, you
121:  will always have room enough for that side of your nature in our
122:  physical weakness & in the marvellous control our love gives you over
123:  us. I often wish I were a man just that I might be tender to women. A
124:  man can do so much more for a woman than she can do for him. It must
125:  be so glorious to have the same unlimited power & use it magnanimously.
126:  A woman has a high sense of that sometimes & its so glorious splendid.
127: 
128:  You say something wh. coming from an ordinary philistine I should take
129:  as a matter of course, but wh. coming from yourself is painful to me.
130:  You say that woman must be kept from the knowledge of the true facts
131:  of life. Why? In order that she may keep faith & hope & gentleness!
132:  Are you not using here the very argument that Xy & superstition have
133:  used in all ages to keep out knowledge? We don't question that it is
134:  the fact but it is better not to know it; it will destroy something
135:  beautiful? Surely we have passed beyond that stage in wh. men desire
136:  to put up a little screen in some corner of the earth & say 'At least
137:  here the sunlight of fact shall not come & scorch up our flowers - &
138:  then the screen gets knocked over at last, as it always must, & then
139:  are found to be nothing but toad stools behind it, the only things
140:  that can grow without light! If faith & hope & gentleness depended on
141:  ignorance then the sooner they went the better, but they do not depend
142:  on it. I remember the burst of infinite delight with wh. one day when
143:  I was thinking of some insects I had been watching it flashed upon me
144:  that life might originate within the parent form. I rushed into the
145:  house to proclaim my glorious discovery & was of course instantly
146:  annihilated, but I believe it was a glorious discovery.
147: 
148:  Viewed from the intellectual side the sexual facts wh. underlie life
149:  from the most complex, the most delicately coordinated & therefore the
150:  most unreadable of the phenomena presented to our intelligence, viewed
151:  from the emotional they are the most beautiful; their power of
152:  expressing affection, of binding human beings together, of creating
153:  life puts them into the category of those things of wh. one does not
154:  easily speak, not because they are painful but because they are sacred.
155:  The man who finds no food in sex matter for anything but a joke, &
156:  the ascetic who turns up his eyes at them are ?merely to be pitied.
157:  Perhaps you will say it is not the knowledge of physical truth you
158:  would keep from women but social facts. Here I cannot again agree with
159:  you. The knowledge of the saddest social facts, that there ^are^ women
160:  who never see a look of respect & tenderness in a man's eyes, who are
161:  of no 'use' among their 'close associates', whose natures are deformed
162:  by the over action of one part & the atrophy of another, that then one
163:  man, sometimes the noblest of the race, in whom inherited instinct
164:  acts so strongly that it always tends to obtain a ?sway incompatible
165:  with the full expression of those highest intelligent powers wh.
166:  constitute the developed custom, & in whom therefore there is always a
167:  conflict - or a submission followed by suffering, & desponding that is
168:  sometimes always ^almost^ despair. This is the saddest of social facts
169:  but the true knowledge of it does not make any woman's heart less
170:  ?forth. It does not make her love man less or desire his love less, I
171:  think it makes her gentler all round
172: 
173:  Olive Schreiner
174: 
175: 
176: 
177: 

Notation

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: S.C. Cronwright-Schreiner SMD 30/33/e
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Telegram
Letter Date	12 December 1920
Address From	Cape Town
Address To
Who To	S.C. ('Cron') Cronwright-Schreiner
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 S.C. ('Cron') Cronwright-Schreiner, 12 December 1920, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner telegram, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date and the address this telegram was sent from are provided by the official postmarks.

1:  From Mrs W. P. Schreiner
2: 
3:  CA 51 K CAPETOWNPO 12 LG/11.
4: 
5:  CRONWRIGHT SCHREINER STANDARD BANK CLEMENTS LANE LN.
6: 
7:  OLIVE DIED PEACEFULLY TENTH SCHREINER.
8: 
9: 
10: 
11: 

Notation
Olive Schreiner died late on 10 December or in the early hours of 11 December 1920, while reading; her glasses were on, a book had fallen from her hands, and the candle had burned out. Cronwright-Schreiner has written onto this telegram: 'Received 5.40pm 13th December 1920 50 Cambridge Terrace, London, W.2. I first got the news in the papers at breakfast'.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Mrs Goosen 87.17/2/Goos/1
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	14 May 1909
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To
Who To	Mrs Goosen
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 Mrs Goosen, 14 May 1909, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections.

1:  De Aar
2:  May 14th 1909
3: 
4:  My dear Mrs Goosen
5: 
6:  My friend Mrs Haldane Murray has just written to tell me how hard you
7:  are working for us at Cathcart. This is just to hold out a hand of
8:  friendship to you. I know how difficult it often is to start a new
9:  thing in an up-country, but once started, & when our women really
10:  understand the the great good, not only to themselves, but to men &
11:  all the nation, the freedom of women will bring, I believe our South
12:  African women will be even more earnest & successful than others.
13: 
14:  I am sending you a little paper by my husband who is strongly in
15:  favour of women's getting the vote.
16: 
17:  Yours very sincerely & wishing you all success
18:  Olive Schreiner
19: 
20: 

Notation
The 'little paper' by Cronwright-Schreiner cannot be established.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: Horatio Kitchener 87.17/1/Kitch/1
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	9 January 1901
Address From	Hanover, Northern Cape
Address To
Who To	Horatio Kitchener
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 Horatio Kitchener, 9 January 1901, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections.

1:  Hanover
2:  Jan 9th 1901
3: 
4:  Lord Kitchener
5: 
6:  Dear Sir,
7: 
8:  I trust you will pardon the liberty I am taking in asking whether, if
9:  you should come to this part of the country you would give me the
10:  favour of unreadable ^half^ an hour's interview with you. If you do not
11:  come to Hanover & would allow me to come to Noupoort or de Aar to meet
12:  you, I would be glad to do so.
13: 
14:  The smallest wild duck knows more about the ins-&-outs of its own
15:  little mountain tarn, than the largest swan from the great lakes who
16:  has but newly arrived there can always do. Therefore it is not
17:  absolutely irrational that I should wish to put a few points before
18:  you.
19: 
20:  If you would kindly allow your secretary to write & tell me whether
21:  you would be willing to see me, I should be very much obliged.
22: 
23:  Yours faithfully
24:  Olive Schreiner
25: 
26: 
27: 

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: F.S. Malan 1000/1
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	Wednesday April 1909
Address From	Eastbergholt, Tamboer's Kloof Road, Gardens, Cape Town
Address To
Who To	Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan
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 Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan, April 1909, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This letter has been dated by reference to content. Schreiner stayed at Eastbergholt in Cape Town for part of April 1909.

1:  Cap
2:  Eastburgholt
3:  Tamboer's Kloof Road
4:  Tamboer's Kloof
5:  Cape Town
6: 
7:  Wednesday
8: 
9:  Dear Friend
10: 
11:  Please return me that little paper I brought you. I only wished you to
12:  see that I too have had my dreams of a United South Africa; a South
13:  Africa Federated into one great collection of Free State: & in which
14:  we who had suffered so terribly & taught by our suffering would
15:  withhold freedom & justice from some of our fellow South Africans,
16:  irrespective of race or colour or creed. In those long months when I
17:  live in one little empty room with a stretcher & a box as its only
18:  furniture, & 36 natives set to guard me at my doors & windows night &
19:  day, when I was only allowed out to fetch my water from the fountain
20:  at certain hours, & when I used to see not only English women but
21:  Dutch women walking free, hanging on the arms often, of English
22:  officers; in all that awful loneliness & darkness the thought that
23:  came to comfort me was that out of all this, would arise in us who
24:  suffered a love not only of freedom for ourselves but for all our
25:  fellows. If we have not learnt that, then indeed we have learnt
26:  nothing.
27: 
28:  Has it ever struck you, Malan, that the day will come when we shall
29:  need the love & devotion of the black & coloured man; just as the day
30:  will come & come soon when England & the "Empire" will need the
31:  loyalty & love of ^white^ South Africans. To-day is our hour to win
32:  their love & confidence. My dear friend, draw yourself sometimes apart
33:  from the noise & greed of the political world about you, & look at
34:  these matters by the light of that deeper spiritual instinct that is
35:  within you.
36: 
37:  Your friend
38:  Olive Schreiner
39: 
40: 

Notation
The 'little paper' referred to is 'Views on closer union', a lengthy article published in the Transvaal Leader on 21 December 1908 and the Cape Times on 22 December 1908 (p.9); it appeared as a short book in 1909.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: F.S. Malan 1000/2
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	After Start: 1907 ; Before End: 1910
Address From	na
Address To
Who To	Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan
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 Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan, 1907, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This letter has been dated by reference to content. Various delegations made representations in Britain supporting or opposing Union of the former settler states of South Africa in 1908 and 1909. Edward VII died in May 1910 and the letter was written before this.

1:  Dear Friend
2: 
3:  With great pleasure republish my little letter about Mrs Koopmans As
4:  to my brother Will, you know I was more opposed to his line of policy,
5:  even than you were, but when Jameson is the Lieutenant of the leader
6:  of the South African party, when men like Farrer & Hall & Fitz Patrick
7:  whose hands drip with the blood of Boer women & children only less
8:  plentifully than Rhodes, when Jan Smuts gets up & makes a speech
9:  commending Rhodes, & saying he wishes he were alive to take part in
10:  the Union of to-day, then I think it is time that all small
11:  differences as to the exact line of policy were dropped. I cannot
12:  understand South African men going & kissing the hand of that
13:  licentious scoundrel King Edward the 7th & going to England to
14:  ?beseech the English people to allow them to have a Union; & then
15:  talking of "we can't appeal to England" - "England has nothing to do
16:  with us". It is a sight for Gods & men to laugh at. I only hope they
17:  will now be loyal to their King & their Empire; for a traitor is the
18:  lowest thing that creeps on Earth!
19: 
20:  I'd like to have a long talk with you I'm not well enough to write.
21: 
22:  Yours ever
23:  Olive Schreiner
24: 
25: 

Notation
Schreiner's 'little paper' about Marie Koopmans-De Wet was an obituary; see 'Marie Koopmans-de Wet' De Suid-Afrikaan 1 Augustus 1906 (p.12).

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: F.S. Malan 1000/3
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	28 December 1908
Address From	Hotel Milner, Matjesfontein, Western Cape
Address To
Who To	Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan
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 Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan, 28 December 1908, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This letter is written on printed headed notepaper.

1:  Hotel Milner
2:  Matjiesfontein
3:  Cape Colony
4: 
5:  Dec 28 / 08
6: 
7:  My dear Friend
8: 
9:  I am sending you a copy of my paper on Closer Union, as you may not
10:  have had time to read it in the Cape Times.
11: 
12:  It goes to my heart to think that you & I should be wide as the poles
13:  apart in this matter. The really great South African will not be a man
14:  who stands for this or that party, or race, or sect, or language - but
15:  for all. I valued very much a kind little Xmas card I got from Onze
16:  Jan. Love to your wife & the little ones. I wish you would all come up
17:  here for a few days during the conventions holiday.
18: 
19:  Aren't you Convention people tired of buttering each other up! When
20:  people flatter me so much I always suspect them of having some evil
21:  design! Some day the butter will all melt, & then you will fight like
22:  the Killing Cats!
23: 
24:  I shall be staying here for two or three months as I got too ill at De
25:  Aar.
26: 
27:  Yours ever
28:  Olive Schreiner
29: 

Notation
Schreiner's Closer Union originated as a lengthy article published in the Transvaal Leader on 21 December 1908 and the Cape Times on 22 December 1908 (p.9); it appeared as a short book in 1909.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: F.S. Malan 1000/4
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	After Start: Tuesday July 1913 ; Before End: September 1913
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To
Who To	Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan
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 Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan, July 1913, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This letter has been dated by reference to content.

1:  De Aar
2:  Tuesday
3: 
4:  To F S Malan
5: 
6:  My dear Friend
7: 
8:  My heart is sore sorrowful. What are these things which you are doing
9:  up in the Transvaal? Could any one have dreamed 1899 that in a short
10:  space of 14 years a Boer Government in South Africa would turn British
11:  troops on to shoot down not merely men women & children but but
12:  Labuschagnes & Van der Merwes in their native land in defense of those
13:  mining magnates property; who have already plunged South Africa into
14:  bloodshed & made our soil reek with the blood of untold English
15:  soldiers & heroic Boer women. Don't think I blame you personally. My
16:  old love for you, & my deep faith in you may perhaps make me unjust in
17:  believing you can be to blame.
18: 
19:  Unless I had it from your lips I couldn't believe that the prisoner of
20:  ?Koberg has changed so utterly. As And I must say that as far as Sauer
21:  & Smuts are concerned they really intended what has happened when they
22:  called British ?hireling troops in to shoot down South Africans. I d
23:  believe that the truth - though it may never come to light as the real
24:  truths of the intrigues of the mining Houses against the Transvaal
25:  will never be known - that money (perhaps not in the form of hard
26:  cash) did flow like water in protection of the mining magnates
27:  property - & that the absolute disregard of human life to this end did
28:  not flow from only from yourselves.
29: 
30:  You have been so near & dear to my spirit in the past, I have fixed
31:  such great hopes on you that I feel I cannot for this once remain
32:  silent without opening my heart to you.
33: 
34:  Yours always
35:  Olive Schreiner
36: 
37: 

Notation

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: F.S. Malan 1000/5
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	After Start: 1902 ; Before End: 1913
Address From	Cape Town, Western Cape
Address To
Who To	Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan
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 Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan, 1902, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This letter can be approximately dated by reference to content. It concerns facilities in Company's Gardens near the Parliament in Cape Town and content indicates Schreiner was in Cape Town when she wrote it.

1:  Dear Friend
2: 
3:  I enclose a cutting from the SA New. (I don't know by whom its
4:  written) I hear you are on the committee which reports on the matter.
5: 
6:  Surely my dear friend will stand with those who do not wish to see a
7:  monopoly made complete & crushing. This little ?pavilion is splendidly
8:  unreadable. I know for I go two or three times a week. You can get
9:  nothing fit to eat or drink at the other place. To put us entirely in
10:  the hands of the big companies would be a public injury.
11: 
12:  If I were well enough I would come to see you about it. To sell the
13:  ?pavilion to the Companies would be quite unworthy of our government,
14:  when even the Jameson rule did not do it. I hope you share my view. If
15:  not please don't act hastily. Think it over again.
16: 
17:  Yours ever
18:  Olive Schreiner
19: 
20: 

Notation
The cutting referred to is no longer attached.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: F.S. Malan 1000/6
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	After Start: 1906 ; Before End: 1910
Address From	Cape Town, Western Cape
Address To
Who To	Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan
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 Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan, 1906, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This letter has been approximately dated by reference to content as having been written after the restitution of responsible government and before Union in South Africa. Content indicates that Schreiner was in Cape Town when she wrote it.

1:  Dear Friend
2: 
3:  Your few words on the woman question last night were of great value to
4:  me.
5: 
6:  That man said that the great question in South Africa at the moment
7:  was that the devils & the angels were fighting for the soul of Malan;
8:  at least on this front the angels have won. May it be so also on that
9:  larger questions which looms as the great moral problem before all
10:  South African men & women, & which will determine the future of South
11:  Africa.
12: 
13:  Yours ever
14:  Olive Schreiner
15: 
16: 

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: F.S. Malan 1000/7
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	6 January 1909
Address From	Hotel Milner, Matjesfontein, Western Cape
Address To
Who To	Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan
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 Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan, 6 January 1909, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. This letter is written on printed headed notepaper.

1:  Hotel Milner
2:  Matjiesfontein
3:  Cape Colony
4: 
5:  Jan 6 1909
6: 
7:  My dear F.S. Malan
8: 
9:  Thank-you for your letter. I wanted to sit down & answer it the hour
10:  it came, but I have not been well enough till now. It comforted my
11:  heart to hear your words on the native question. Even if you do
12:  nothing, it is something to know you feel the duty we owe to the
13:  millions in our power.
14: 
15:  Yes, it is a sad thing that the small body of thoughtful persons in
16:  South Africa who are really seeking for the best for their country
17:  without thought of self cannot be thrown more into contact with each
18:  other, by the exchange of thought & feeling to strengthen & also to
19:  back one another. I have had several very interesting letters ^since I
20:  wrote my paper^ from public men & others expressing sympathy with the
21:  broader view of the native question & our national life; but each
22:  write in the sad tone of - "I, only I am left." I suppose there are
23:  hours when we all of us sit with Elija at the door of his cave; but
24:  would not the answer be even in South Africa today - "Have I not kept
25:  unto me -" What I feel we really need is some central point about
26:  which we may rally! That a small strong united, enlightened party,
27:  never in the majority, but always making its presence felt might do
28:  great things for South Africa even now.
29: 
30:  Your letter is so full of things I want to write about but it is so
31:  hard to write & so easy to talk I wish we could rather speak. You say,
32:  "How is a statesman to represent all, when all divided." (NB. The
33:  great man or men who are able to lead & help South Africa need not
34:  necessarily be part politics: they may be newspaper editors or
35:  anything else, so they lead & enlighten the people. You, as far as I
36:  can see, which is of course only a little way, were doing far greater
37:  work when you wrote those wonderful little sub leaders in Ons Land,
38:  which even Milner said were the most wonderful things in journalism he
39:  had ever come across, & when you were sitting a prisoner in ?Toku,
40:  than you have ever done since you became an important member of a
41:  party ministry.) Of course a great man cannot represent all when all
42:  are divided. A great man does not represent, unreadable he can leave
43:  small men to do that; he leads, & teaches, & unites men in ways they
44:  would not have been led, & taught united without him! All good & true
45:  men can only represent one thing - their principles of justice & right
46:  - in a complex land like this these may lead them now to aid one party
47:  by opposing them & showing them they are wrong & then another.
48:  Yesterday it was the English South African who had to be helped, by
49:  resisting him in his course of injustice & oppression towards the
50:  Republics, tomorrow it may be farming element ie the land money
51:  capitalists; who have to be resisted in their attempt to make all
52:  burdens fall on other classes; the next day it may be all white
53:  classes who are combined by greed & fear to do injustice to the dark:
54:  - but while he does this he will steadily seek the good of all. He
55:  will sympathize with all where he can sympathize. He will recognize
56:  the good. You may say "Yes, & he will die of a broken heart before he
57:  is fifty." Yes, I think so too. But what does it matter. He'll have to
58:  die some way any how. There is one rather monotonous story about the
59:  ^all^ world's greatest & best sons - "He was crucified, died & buried -
60:  & the third day he rose again from the dead! Perhaps he is not
61:  physically crucified, nor does he physically rise again; but he
62:  sacrifices again & again those ambitions that are dear to the heart of
63:  man, & perhaps those friendships & associations that are dearer than
64:  all, & accepts what seems failure & defeat - but the large human ends
65:  of humanity & justice for which he lived go on & unreadable triumph
66:  because he suffered defeat & failure. When dear old Sir William Butler
67:  left this country he wrote me a heart-broken letter from Madeira; it
68:  seemed even to him that he had failed utterly, & that all he had done
69:  was of no use. But even you & I can to-day see that the part he plaid
70:  in South Africa was a much greater success than that of Milner &
71:  Rhodes; & in the years to come all men will see it. That's the only
72:  kind of success one wants for the men one loves & wants to look up it
73:  to. These are the true leaders of men, not the followers of majorities;
74:  or even always the leaders of minorities; the men who at times have
75:  to stand quite alone - & do.
76: 
77:  You say, my dear friend, that my ideal is that of a philosophic
78:  thinker, & not of a "statesman". Well, it certainly isn't of a Rhodes
79:  or a Milner or a Curzon or of some men near home; but as I look upon
80:  statesmen of that type as as a kind of unreadable parasite developed
81:  in the blood of humanity & feeding on it, I have no ambition that any
82:  man I value should attain it to it.
83: 
84:  I do not value the mere philosophic thinker at all. The man I value,
85:  who alone seems to me really great, is the man who strives to put it
86:  in to action & incarnate in his life the ideals that have shaped
87:  themselves in his soul. He will fail often; he will make mistakes; it
88:  is for no man to blame him or judge him, who has ever in the humblest
89:  way tried to realize his own ideals in practical daily life. I see
90:  only too clearly the almost superhuman difficulties which must rise
91:  before any ^man^ who in South Africa, tries to lead ^practically^ his
92:  fellows towards broader ideals of humanity & natural life - but I do
93:  see glorious possibilities - though they may often mean "heaven's
94:  success bound to Earth's failures." South Africa seems to me to-day to
95:  call aloud for some man who amid the universal materialism & racial
96:  narrowness shall raise a nobler standard & try to induce us to follow
97:  it. I think you are in a peculiarly happy position because being Dutch
98:  by blood & having suffered & done so much for your own race they will
99:  be inclined to be influenced by you where they would not be by another,
100:  & at the same time I think you are more trusted by the English than
101:  any man of non English blood. And at this moment there are
102:  opportunities of influencing the life of millions for good, or for
103:  evil that only come once, & perhaps not so often in a hundred years.
104: 
105:  The problems of Dutch & English have for me quite vanished away from
106:  the practical horizon in South Africa now. The problem that is rising
107:  before us is that of the combination of the capitalist-classes,
108:  land-owning & mine-owning, against the rest of the community; & ^an^
109:  ignorant, blind, land-thirsty, gold-thirsty native policy; which will
110:  plunge South Africa into war & bitterness, compared ^with^ which the
111:  Boer War was nothing. In the picture of Jameson walking with his arm
112:  round the neck of his fellow "Conventioner" of Africander blood, I see
113:  an omen of evil. It is not love that is uniting you all - it is greed.
114:  Cheap land, cheap labour, cheap mines, exploit the nigger - that is
115:  the bond that is uniting you! Merriman tells us there are to be no
116:  more parties; that every principle is to die; well we shall see! This
117:  is a long & very stupid letter. But you know how hard it is to write
118:  compared to talking.
119: 
120:  Yours ever
121:  Olive Schreiner
122: 

Notation
The paper Schreiner refers to having written is 'Views on closer union', a lengthy article published in the Transvaal Leader on 21 December 1908 and the Cape Times on 22 December 1908 (p.9); it appeared as a short book in 1909.

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: F.S. Malan 1000/8
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	Saturday 10 July 1909
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To
Who To	Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan
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 Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan, 10 July 1909, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections. The date has been written on this letter in an unknown hand.

1:  De Aar
2:  Saturday
3: 
4:  Dear Friend
5: 
6:  Your speech was splendid. One friend writes me that there was hardly a
7:  woman belonging to us in the audience whose eyes were dry when you
8:  spoke of the English suffragettes.
9: 
10:  There is one point I wish to write to you about as soon as I am better
11:  - it your statement that women do not suffer any injustice under men
12:  made laws. What of the C.D. Acts? What of the laws which even in this
13:  land shut us out from almost all professions & ways of earning our
14:  bread - ie. the law, the civil service &c &c. Only the other day a
15:  woman wanted to be articled as a clerk (There are endless other
16:  points) I wish we could talk of over the matter. I don't think you've
17:  given it full consideration. Have you??
18: 
19:  But you speech was splendid, dear friend. I thank you for having done
20:  such justice to yourself. When you make such a speech on the native
21:  question I shall go to my grave more restfully, feeling one more dream
22:  was ^has been^ realized.
23: 
24:  I suppose it was because you stood forward so as our leader, on the
25:  path of ^towards^ justice & freedom during the war, that I cannot shake
26:  myself from the feeling you should always stand so in other matters as
27:  well. I wish the time would come when you & my brother would work
28:  together. He has such a high admiration for your character. I was
29:  speaking to him the other day about some of our public men & their
30:  absolute want of any aim higher than immediate personal success - when
31:  he said, "But you don't include Malan - surely you understand that he
32:  is a man of an altogether different & higher calibre!" But he won't
33:  live long his heart is very bad, & you I hope have a long, long life
34:  before you. Therefore it matters so much in what direction your start
35:  it. My dear old brother is only finding his true direction near the
36:  end of his life - you must find yours now.
37: 
38:  If one can't fix one's hope of ^for^ great, liberal enlightened lines of
39:  action up you, then there is no public man in South Africa to whom one
40:  can look with hope.
41: 
42:  Thank you so much for your speech. Love to your dear wife.
43:  Olive Schreiner
44: 
45:  ^I am sending you a copy of "Votes for Women" with a very interesting
46:  letter by Lord Lytton, which you might find it worth while to read.^
47: 

Letter Reference	View Olive Schreiner: F.S. Malan 1000/9
Archive	National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	16 October 1913
Address From	De Aar, Northern Cape
Address To
Who To	Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan
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 Francois Stephanus ('FS') Malan, 16 October 1913, National English Literary Museum, Grahamstown, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National English Literary Museum (NELM) for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscript Collections.

1:  De Aar
2:  Oct 16th 1913
3: 
4:  Dear Friend
5: 
6:  You will have wondered why I never answered your kind letter, but I
7:  have been too ill to write to any one. I am leaving for Europe on the
8:  6th of Dec to see if the Doctors in Europe can do for my heart.
9: 
10:  I can't write to you about public matters. I personally have never
11:  wished Gladstone to be recalled, nor did I think your ministry ought
12:  to resign. Would he gain anything better by it? But I am opposed to
13:  Botha's silly Imperialism when he talks English, & narrow
14:  back-velt-ism when he talks Dutch!! Give my love to your wife, & the
15:  dear children. I hope the young generation will live to see a nobler
16:  broader, less racial spirit than we see in South Africa to-day. I
17:  shall be in Cape Town at the end of November & perhaps may have the
18:  pleasure of seeing you before I sail.
19: 
20:  Your true friend
21:  Olive Schreiner
22: 
23: 
24: