Olive Schreiner Letters Online

Letter Reference	Olive Schreiner: Extracts of Letters to Cronwright-Schreiner MSC 26/2.16/495
Archive	National Library of South Africa, Special Collections, Cape Town
Epistolary Type	Extract
Letter Date	11 January 1911
Address From	na
Address To
Who To	S.C. (‘Cron’) Cronwright-Schreiner
Other Versions	Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 298

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, 11 January 1911, NLSA Cape Town, Special Collections, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to the National Library of South Africa (NLSA), Cape Town, for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner extract, which is part of its Special Collections. This extract 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. However, when Olive Schreiner's originals can be compared, this shows his extracts to be severely shortened, and/or inaccurate in sometimes minor but sometimes major respects, while their frequent multiple dates (eg. 8-15 August) indicate that he often combined a number of original letters, among other bowdlerisations and intrusions as well as deletions. Consequently the status of the Cronwright-Schreiner Extracts, of which this is one, is that they are artefacts of his editorial practices, rather than being ‘Olive Schreiner letters’ as such. They 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 written the date and where it was sent from onto this extract, and that ‘She had written from Portlock, Graaff Reinet, to the occupants of Lelie Kloof about visiting that farm, & he had replied he’d board her & let her have a sitting room & a bedroom.’. There are some differences between this transcription and the version that appears in The Letters….

1:  …Won’t it be lovely to be at old Lelie Kloof again? I feel as if I
2:  should be a young, young girl again if I go there & dance about on the
3:  rocks in the river & throw up my arms & shout from sheer excess of
4:  life & joy like I used to in the old days!! Of course I’m not such a
5:  fool as the think I shall, but I feel as if I would!...
6: 
7:  I’ve just been reading Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. How pure
8:  & beautiful & sweet he is, but broadly human, but with such a high
9:  sense of honour always. Never in one instance does he countenance
10:  falsehood or disloyalty between human souls…
11: 
12:  It’s such a change to come to him after reading a hideous thing by
13:  Wells in English review, which I am sending you, called The New
14:  Macchiavelli. There is something so absolutely low about Wells with
15:  all his cleverness, low & sordid. One feels he must have grown up
16:  among quite the servant class, & not got even any of that sense of
17:  honour & loyalty that so many quite uneducated men have like dear old
18:  John Pursglove & many of my working men friends in England. I don’t
19:  know why his books make one feel sick & shrink from the thought of the
20:  man himself. Except that woman who wrote Sir Richard Calmady I
21:  don’t know any one who makes all sex, which should be so beautiful &
22:  sacred a mater, wholly repulsive…
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