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Letter ReferenceOlive Schreiner BC16/Box11/Fold2/Undated/41
ArchiveUniversity of Cape Town, Manuscripts & Archives, Cape Town
Epistolary TypeLetter
Letter Date1912
Address FromDe Aar, Northern Cape
Address To
Who ToAlice Greene
Other Versions
PermissionsPlease read before using or citing this transcription
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 year of 1909 has been written on this letter in an unknown hand, altough content indicates that it was written during 1912.
1 De Aar
2
3 Alice dear, your speech if the papers reported it truly, was a great
4sorrow to me. It would have been quite right at an anti-suffrage
5meeting, but at a meeting of a society for giving women the vote, I
6can’t see what it had to do! I know you & Miss Molteno are as far
7from me as the east from the west on all questions sex, & woman
8suffering^s^ & ^her^ positions ^in life^. The great economic question,
9^perhaps^ because it has never touched either of you personally, (at
10least not Betty who has always had a hundred & fifty or two hundred a
11year) seems for you not to exist.
12
13 I have hired a bed room at Muizenberg for £12 a month, I to find my
14own food. Its so expensive I shan’t be able to stay for more than
15two months ^so^ I shall try & stay here till after Xmas if I can & the
16heat is not too crushing It has been nothing to speak of yet & still
17I’m rather going to bits under it. I do hope you’ll be somewhere
18near Cape Town when I come. Dr Brown tells me Dube has built a little
19house for you ^& Betty^ & which they saw when they were there. Mrs Brown
20said when she passed that Betty talked of going to Jo’burg with her.
21Tell Betty if she goes past with coming to eat some of my nice
22macaroni cheese I’ll kill her – when I do see her.
23
24 Good bye dear. It’s so sad we are so divided on all questions
25touching sex; but you are allways beautiful & true; & mere "views"
26never make a bit of difference in my love to any one.
27
28 And those terrible papers may entirely have misreported you. It’s so
29easy to give a tone to a speech that was not in it at all.
30
31 But I was so cut up when I read of your paper I couldn’t eat or
32sleep last night. I’d like to have a talk with you about some things
33
34 Yours ever & ever
35 Olive
36
37
38
Notation
Alice Greene's speech was reported in the Cape Times or Cape Argus and concerns some speeches or addresses she gave concerned with 'The existing franchise of the South African Union' and 'Problems arising from the Unification of South Africa', when she returned to South Africa after eight years absence. In the absence of more specific dates for the speeches, it has not been possible to trace the newspaper reports.