Olive Schreiner Letters Online

Letter Reference	Olive Schreiner BC16/Box1/Fold5/1898/1
Archive	University of Cape Town, Manuscripts & Archives, Cape Town
Epistolary Type	Letter
Letter Date	1 March 1898
Address From	The Homestead, Kimberley, Northern Cape
Address To	Girls Collegiate School, Port Elizabeth, Eastern Cape
Who To	Betty Molteno
Other Versions	Rive 1987: 326

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 Betty Molteno, 1 March 1898, UCT Manuscripts & Archives, Olive Schreiner Letters Project transcription’. Please also supply letter line numbers for specific quotations.

Legend
The Project is grateful to Manuscripts and Archives, University of Cape Town, for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Manuscripts and Archives Collections. The name of the addressee and the address this letter was sent to are provided by an attached envelope. The name of the addressee is also indicated by salutation and content.

1:  The Homestead
2:  March 1st 1898
3: 
4:  Dear Friend
5: 
6:  The picture has just come. I do like it so. I’m going to hang it up in
7:  my study.
8: 
9:  No, we shan’t be able to go to the Kowie this year. It will be
10:  splendid if you & Miss Greene come up. Come before the green has gone
11:  from the velt. It’s so lovely now. Bring your bicycles with you so
12:  that we can all go some rides together. I can’t ride fast but it takes
13:  one out into the beautiful velt.
14: 
15:  I am better & working a little again after four weeks off. Wasn’t that
16:  a splendid speech of President Steyn’s? The Dutch seem the old only
17:  people who are slowly waking up to the fact that if the whole country
18:  with all its mineral wealth, mines, tramways, & farms, passes into a
19:  few hands ^of capitalists,^ freedom in the next generation will be a
20:  dream of the past in South Africa; but they are only waking up very
21:  slowly. If only Dutchmen Englishmen & Natives would all see where the
22:  common danger lies & combine against the common enemy, which is not a
23:  person; but a system. If Rhodes were to die tomorrow, we should be
24:  free of the most energetic of the capitalists, but capitalism would be
25:  with us still! And after all, is it not we who have brought the
26:  disease on ourselves? Capitalism does not exist in New Zealand because
27:  men there have been awake to its evils & made it impossible for the
28:  capitalist to flourish there.
29: 
30:  I long so to see you both. When will you come? I am busy making a
31:  little garden before the door at the back. Cron has put up the hedge
32:  for me. We had our wedding-day last week; we have been married four
33:  years. They say that all the romance of married life is over when you
34:  have been married that length of time. But it seems to me not only
35:  does the other become dearer to you, but he seems more beautiful.
36: 
37:  Good bye dear friends. I’ve got hundreds of things to say, but we can
38: 
39:  ^talk when you come.
40:  Olive^
41: 
42:  ^Alice Corthorn has gone to India to attend the plague patients at
43:  Bombay. I am a little anxious about her. I see one lady Doctor has
44:  died of the plague already.^
45: 
46: 
47: 

Notation
Rive's (1987) version omits part of this letter and is also in a number of respects incorrect.