"Not love uniting you but greed, gold-thirsty native policy, cheap labour" Read the full letter
| Letter Reference | SCCSTheLetters/Stead/6 |
| Archive | |
| Epistolary Type | |
| Letter Date | 25 March 1895 |
| Address From | The Homestead, Kimberley, Northern Cape |
| Address To | |
| Who To | William Thomas Stead |
| Other Versions | Cronwright-Schreiner 1924: 219 |
| Permissions | Please read before using or citing this transcription |
| Legend |
When Cronwright-Schreiner prepared The Letters of Olive Schreiner, with few exceptions he then destroyed her originals. However, some people gave him copies and kept the originals or demanded the return of these; and when actual Schreiner letters can be compared with his versions, his have omissions, distortions and bowdlerisations. There is a small group of separate typescripts of SCCS-edited letters to W.T. Stead, which appear in The Letters but for which no originals are extant. Schreiner letters to Stead where originals survive will be found in relevant collections; the SCCS extracts are included here for sake of completeness. However, their relationship to the original letters cannot now be gauged, and so they should be read with caution for the reasons given.
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1The Homestead, Kimberley, 25th Mar.
2To W. T. Stead.
3
4My married life satisfies even the high ideal of what marriage might
5be which has haunted me ever since I was a little child.
6
7You refer to that woman as the man’s “mistress.” But there is nothing
8to imply that the man supported her, and no woman can rightly be
9called a mistress and still less a prostitute, unless she sells her
10body in return for gain. To me the purity of a sex relation between a
11man and a woman lies finally in the fact that it is not a matter of
12material considerations. That is nearly the only point in the woman
13question on which you never seem to see clearly.
14
2To W. T. Stead.
3
4My married life satisfies even the high ideal of what marriage might
5be which has haunted me ever since I was a little child.
6
7You refer to that woman as the man’s “mistress.” But there is nothing
8to imply that the man supported her, and no woman can rightly be
9called a mistress and still less a prostitute, unless she sells her
10body in return for gain. To me the purity of a sex relation between a
11man and a woman lies finally in the fact that it is not a matter of
12material considerations. That is nearly the only point in the woman
13question on which you never seem to see clearly.
14
Notation
Cronwright-Schreiner places this part letter with no year given in the 1895 sequence.
Cronwright-Schreiner places this part letter with no year given in the 1895 sequence.