Olive Schreiner Letters Online

Letter Reference	Letters/473
Archive
Epistolary Type
Letter Date	27 June 1908
Address From	Tamboer’s Kloof, Gardens, Cape Town, Western Cape
Address To
Who To	Adela Villiers Smith nee Villiers
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 280-1

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, 27 June 1908, NLSA Cape Town, Special Collections, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
When Cronwright-Schreiner prepared The Life... (1924) and The Letters of Olive Schreiner (1924), with few exceptions he then destroyed the original letters in his possession. When Olive Schreiner’s originals can be compared with his edited versions, his versions are severely shortened, and/or inaccurate in sometimes minor but sometimes major respects, and/or are combinations of a number of original letters. The status of ‘the Cronwright-Schreiner letters’ is therefore that they are artefacts of his editorial practices, rather than being ‘Olive Schreiner letters’ as such. Consequently, where original letters which appear in The Letters... have been traced, they appear in the context of the appropriate archive collections and not as ‘a Cronwright-Schreiner letter’. In addition, where a version exists as one of the Extracts made in preparing The Letters..., the extract version is provided because usually longer and in other ways closer to the characteristic writing practices of Schreiner’s original letters. The remaining ‘Cronwright-Schreiner letters’, of which this is one, are provided for the sake of completeness, because they give clues as to where Schreiner was resident at different points in time, and indicate some of her activities. However, they should be read and used with considerable caution for the reasons spelled out here. Cronwright-Schreiner has supplied the word ‘like’ between ‘I felt’ and ‘the wonderful Kaffir woman’.

1:  To Mrs. Francis Smith.
2:  Tamboer's Kloof, Cape Town, 27th June.
3: 
4:  ... I seem to have so strangely little connection with South African
5:  life or people now. But my only friends in Cape Town, the Purcells,
6:  will be back in about two weeks, I hope, and she will bring the sweet
7:  little baby to see me. Oh, I do long for it so. I know how I shall
8:  love it. My heart feels so tender over a baby girl because of all the
9:  anguish which may be before it. I always think of it when I touch and
10:  hold in my arms the dear little female bodies; which no love can
11:  shield from the anguish which may be waiting for them. I have done all
12:  I can to help to free women, but oh it is so little. Long ages must
13:  pass before we really stand free and look out on a world that is ours
14:  as well as man's. The poor little political franchise is just a tiny,
15:  little, wee step towards it. I don't think you can understand a little
16:  how I love those suffragettes in London, those that I do know, and
17:  those that I don't. They are women who have freed themselves
18:  spiritually fighting for freedom: we, here, have in our little
19:  movement only slaves clanking their little chains along as they go,
20:  asking for their little franchise. You know when I was a young girl
21:  and a child I felt this awful bitterness in my soul because I was a
22:  woman, because there were women in the world. I felt [like] the
23:  wonderful Kaffir woman, who once was talking to me and said, "There
24:  may be a God, I do not say there is not; but if there is he is not
25:  good - why did he make woman?" During those ten or twelve happy middle
26:  years of my life the bitterness went; I realised the evils of woman's
27:  position but I was so full of infinite hope. Every thing seemed coming
28:  right quite soon just on the other side of the hill. I loved all my
29:  beautiful men friends in England and the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth
30:  seemed just here. Now, especially during the last eight years, I seem
31:  struggling with more than the old bitterness; it seems choking me,
32:  suffocating me sometimes. I try to fix my eye on the future but the
33:  future seems so far. It wouldn't matter a bit that one will never
34:  reach it if one knew it were coming soon to others. These dear
35:  suffragettes are just making life possible to me. It's not what they
36:  are trying to get, it's what they are becoming - they are breaking
37:  free!!
38: