"Hounding of Mashona, evil keeps begetting itself, mills of God" Read the full letter
| Letter Reference | Olive Schreiner: Extracts of Letters to Cronwright-Schreiner MSC 26/2.16/514 |
| Archive | National Library of South Africa, Special Collections, Cape Town |
| Epistolary Type | Extract |
| Letter Date | 15 June 1914 |
| Address From | Bad Nauheim, Germany |
| Address To | |
| Who To | S.C. (‘Cron’) Cronwright-Schreiner |
| Other Versions | Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 335 |
| Permissions | Please read before using or citing this transcription |
| Legend |
The Extracts of Letters to Cronwright-Schreiner were produced by Cronwright-Schreiner in preparing The Life and The Letters of Olive Schreiner. They appear on slips of paper in his writing, taken from letters that were then destroyed; many of these extracts have also been edited by him. They are artefacts of his editorial practices and their relationship to original Schreiner letters cannot now be gauged. They should be read with considerable caution for the reasons given. Cronwright-Schreiner has written the date and where it was sent from onto this extract. There are some differences between this transcription and the version that appears in The Letters….
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…Yesterday Will took me & Ursula to Frankfort-on-the-Main. It's
2about 3/4 of an hour from here by train. We went first to see
3Goethe’s old house where his father and mother lived to the end. No
4place I have ever been to has so touched me so. It is quite unchanged.
5The old desk he wrote on in his youth & where he wrote his early books
6& the first part of Faust stands there with the ink marks over it. The
7kitchen has still got the old fashioned pots & pans. In the room where
8he was born on the wall hangs a page of a Frankfort newspaper of the
9day with the birth notice in it among others, that the wife of
10Councillor Goethe had that day given birth to a son!! You know it
11brought back all my own youth in such a strange way, the time when I
12was a little governess & Goethe was more to me than any writer except
13Mill, & how I used to long to see that house & dream of it. It’s
14just as I pictured it. In the little room at the back where his
15letters &c are kept in cases there is a wonderful picture of him
16painted I think when he was 82, just a few weeks before he died, one
17of the most wonderful pictures in the world...
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2about 3/4 of an hour from here by train. We went first to see
3Goethe’s old house where his father and mother lived to the end. No
4place I have ever been to has so touched me so. It is quite unchanged.
5The old desk he wrote on in his youth & where he wrote his early books
6& the first part of Faust stands there with the ink marks over it. The
7kitchen has still got the old fashioned pots & pans. In the room where
8he was born on the wall hangs a page of a Frankfort newspaper of the
9day with the birth notice in it among others, that the wife of
10Councillor Goethe had that day given birth to a son!! You know it
11brought back all my own youth in such a strange way, the time when I
12was a little governess & Goethe was more to me than any writer except
13Mill, & how I used to long to see that house & dream of it. It’s
14just as I pictured it. In the little room at the back where his
15letters &c are kept in cases there is a wonderful picture of him
16painted I think when he was 82, just a few weeks before he died, one
17of the most wonderful pictures in the world...
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