"Heart dying up last 5 or 6 years, 'Soul of a People' like rain falling on dry parched soil" Read the full letter
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Letter ReferenceEdward Carpenter 359/87
ArchiveSheffield Archives, Archives & Local Studies, Sheffield
Epistolary TypeLetter
Letter Date27 February 1905
Address FromHanover, Northern Cape
Address To
Who ToEdward Carpenter
Other Versions
PermissionsPlease read before using or citing this transcription
Legend
The Project is grateful to the Sheffield Archives, Sheffield Libraries, Archives and Information Services, for kindly allowing us to transcribe this Olive Schreiner letter, which is part of its Archive Collections.
1 Hanover
2 Feb 27 / 05
3
4 Dear Ed
5
6 The more I read your book the more I like it; that’s one thing I
7have to say. Another is that such a funny thing happened just when I
8was reading your book I got a long letter from a woman friend of mine
9(the Miss Molteno whom you met in my room at Alice Corthorn’s when I
10was last in London). She had been to the British Museum & looking at
11the old Bulls & Gods, & she expressed in quite different words & not
12nearly as well, many of the views in your book in the Chapter (the
13gods are apparitions of the race life &c). It is curious how that is
14in the air; how none of us really live & think alone though we seem so
15utterly alone.
16
17 My heart is very much in Russia now; I sometimes seem almost living
18more in Russia
19
20^than in Africa here. If once you have lived under a crushing foreign
21tyranny as we have here, you know & understand so many things in such
22an utterly new way. There are some things no imagination can show you
23till you have actually lived under them. We leave this next week for
24Cape Town where Cron goes for this his three months in Parliament. ^
25
26 Goodbye
27 Olive
28
Notation
The book referred to is: Edward Carpenter (1904) The Art of Creation London: George Allen & Unwin.