Journal of European Studies

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Shadows lying across her pages: epistolary aspects of reading

'the eventful I' in Olive Schreiner's letters
Liz Stanley
Journal of European Studies 2002; 32; 251
DOI: 10.1177/004724410203212512

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 251

Shadows lying across her pages: epistolary

aspects of reading ’the eventful I’ in
Olive Schreiner’s letters
LIZ STANLEY* University of Manchester

Introduction
This article discusses some aspects of the letters written by the South
African feminist writer and theorist, Olive Schreiner (1855-1920).
Schreiner is now perhaps best known in English-speaking countries
as the author of the quintessential ’New Woman’ novel, Tlte Story of
an African Farm (1883), and of Woman and Labour (1911 ), a
key work of
feminist theory for Schreiner’s own generation and that which
followed. However, in her lifetime she was even better known in
Europe, Japan, Russia and USA as a writer of allegories and in South
Africa as a political essayist. Schreiner was ’a writer’ and wrote
voluminously for her own pleasure as well as other people’s, in novels,
short stories, allegories, essays, and also a diary and letters from when
she was a teenager up to the day of her death.’ Two, in different ways
unsatisfactory, general collections of her letters have been published
to date;2 there is also an exemplary edition containing the corres-
3
pondence between Schreiner and Havelock Ellis.
In Schreiner’s young womanhood, growing up on what was then
the frontier of the Eastern Cape, her major intellechial reference point
was to a perceived ’home’ at the heart of the metropolitan centre of

England. At this time in her life she saw herself very much as a
person of European extraction, education and heritage, despite having
been born and brought up elsewhere. Schreiner lived in Britain from
1881 to late 1889. From then until late 1913 she lived in South Africa

* My work on Olive Schreiner’s archived letters has been supported by a Research

Fellowship awarded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council
(R000271029); I am very pleased to acknowledge the ESRC’s support here. Some of
the work for this article was carried out whileI held the Hugh Le May Fellowship at
Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, andI am grateful to Rhodes for
awarding me the Fellowship. Address for correspondence: Sociology Department,
University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK. E-mail: liz.stanley@man.ac.uk
00~7-2~-11/02/3202&3-0251 $5.00 © 2002 Richard Sadler Ltd

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252
over a period of momentous events and change in its history. She
travelled to Europe and lived in Britain from late 1914 to late 1920,
then returned to South Africa a very ill woman - she suffered from
an incapacitating congenital heart condition - and died a few weeks
later.
From her return to South Africa in late 1889 onwards, Schreiner
saw herself as an ’Afrikander’: someone who was white but whose

allegiances, whose sense of belonging and self, and whose political

and ethical priorities, were very much of Africa. Over her lifetime an
inveterate letter-writer, Schreiner’s letters are highly responsive to
the interests and concerns of her key correspondents; they chart her
changing ideas about and analysis of the developing political context
they were written in; and also in interesting and complex ways
they construct and express changes in ’my self’. As a consequence,
Schreiner’s letters both reinforce and, increasingly from the later
1880s onwards, challenge ’the nation’ - the imperial nation of Britain
and the metropolitan imperial centre of Europe, and also the post-
colonial nation of South Africa after Union in 1910.4 Olive Schreiner’s
letters, then, are both ’of Europe’ and ’of Africa’, with the relationship
between Europe and Africa changing markedly and becoming
increasingly an issue for her. The argument herein is that these
developments were underpinned and propelled by Schreiner’s
changing ideas about ’race’, with this in turn linked (to put it no
stronger) to her analysis of the social and economic changes
attendant on capitalist forces within imperialist expansionism at
work in Southern Africa.55
Trev Broughton6 has written about the need to take seriously ’the
actual course of things’ in life-writing of different kinds, to avoid
seeing ’the text’ as somehow unconnected with the context it was
produced in. While taking seriously matters of textuality, the
discussion here also sees the ’actual course of things’ as a bedrock,
not least because Schreiner’s letters are centrally concerned with
events, with the course of things, particularly with the course of
things in Southern Africa. There are attendant implications for how
and in what ways and with what limits Schreiner wrote ’I’ in her
letters; consequently, the main focus of what follows is on the
conjunction of ’self-life-writing’ in Olive Schreiner’s letters around
her complex and changing deployment of ’we’ and ’our’ categories.

’The eventful I’ in Schreiner’s letters

Schreiner’s concern with the long shadow of ’race’ matters in South
Africa is closely intertwined with how she inscribed ’my self’, and
this can be usefully explored by focusing on letters written between

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Schreiner’s return to South Africa in late 1889 and 1913, when she
moved back to Europe again. There are in excess of a thousand extant
letters written over this period; discussion here concerns a large sub-
set dealing in whole or part with ’race’ matters, of which there are
several hundred. In these, there are a number of interlinked themes
around which Schreiner’s concerns with ’race’ matters are articulated.
These occur and recur,and their expression and meaning within the
wider corpus of Schreiner’s thinking shifts and develops over time.
For Schreiner, there are parallels, but not synonymity, between the
category relationship of ’black/white’ and that of ’woman/man’. She
perceived ’the native question’ as symbiotically linked to capitalist
and imperialist expansion; in Southern Africa she saw it as closely
mapped onto ’the labour question’ and over time taking on a highly
gendered form and so re-working ’the woman question’. Schreiner also
used what were seen at the time as ’technical’ terms’to discuss such
matters, with, for instance, ’native’ referring to land-disappropriated
black peoples generally in South Africa, ’Kaffir’ to people of an
Eastern Cape Khoikhoi origin and ’Kaffir-San’ to people of mixed
Khoikhoi and San or Bushman origin-8
Schreiner was also insistent that the dynamic of these linked
’questions’ in life, in the actual course of things, has implications for
’we [whites]’ and what we should actually do if we claim to hold
particular principles. There are, however, different kinds or types of
’we’ contained within the category ’we [whites]’ as she used it, with
partly an ethnic basis to these variations but mainly a moral or ethical
one. One such variation concerns gendered categories of ’[white] we’
and’[white, liberal] you’ around the political and ethical behaviour
Schreiner thought ought to counter inequalities and injustices.
One of Schreiner’s most interesting analytical concerns is with the
future, with how the past and the present lead on almost inexorably
to condition if not to determine what is yet to be. She was insistent
across many letters that the events and actions of ’now’ have

consequences for the ’then’ of the future; and in particular that the
iniquities of racial injustice in South Africa would firstly be massively
exacerbated by the white-dominated state and then eventuate in
some kind of conflagration. She was also clear that retribution for
these iniquities would be the lot of future generations, not of those
actually directly responsible for them.
There are sometimes marked differences in how Schreiner expressed
her ideas around ’race’ issues in her letters to different people, a
product of her responsiveness to her different correspondents and
sometimes also of her attempts to cajole or persuade them to change.
Thus, for instance, in some 1910 letters to the Boer or Afrikaner
politician Jan Smuts and his wife, Isie, she expressed paternalistic

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254
views about ’race’ in relation to the Indian population of South
Africa, while letters between her and her friends Betty Molteno and
Alice Greene make it clear she did so because this might be more
successful in influencing Smuts. Also, the articulation of her ’race’
ideas changed significantly over time - her views were by no means
static. Both the responsiveness and the changes over time can be
shown by looking at (re)configurations of ’we’ in some of Schreiner’s
letters concerned with ’race’ matters.
Two of the letters to be discussed were written within weeks of
each other as the South African War 1899-1902 was starting. The first
is to Schreiner’s closest friend, the progressive educationalist Betty
Molteno, and the second is to her brother Will, to whom she was
especially close and who was at this time Prime Minister of the Cape
Colony. Both were written in the context of liberals and radicals in
the Cape Colony witnessing (and disapproving of) British aggrand-
isement, in the form of Sir Alfred Milner, the incoming Governor and
also British High Commissioner in Southern Africa, provoking war
with the Boer Republics of the ZAR (or Transvaal) and the Orange
Free State, with his eye on Rand gold and imperial expansion
northwards in Africa.
The third letter I shall discuss is to Schreiner’s close friend in
England, Edward Carpenter, and was written in mid-1904. The
context of this letter was the various jockeying for power as Britain
granted ’responsible government’ to the settler states in South Africa,
with an election taking place the following year. Its twin concerns are
the designs and effects of capitalism for ’the natives’, and the dishonest
position of the Boers, linked because of Schreiner’s (entirely accurate)
perception of what would be the future relationship between a Boer
government and capitalist interests (see here also Letter extract 6,
from mid-1913).
The fourth and fifth letters considered were written in 1912 to
Miemie Murray, whom Schreiner had met in 1907 when helping to
establish the Cape Women’s Enfranchisement League. The context
here was that suffrage societies in the ZAR and Orange Free State
had adopted a racial platform for women’s suffrage, with the executive
of the Cape Society also agreeing to this. Schreiner had resigned her
membership as well as Vice-Presidency of the Cape Society and
insisted its executive had acted unconstitutionally. She thereby
opposed some of her closest feminist friends, like Anna Purcell, Mary
Brown and ’the Molteno clan’ (apart from her closest friend, Betty
Molteno), with whom she had been involved in the peace campaign
and the women’s relief committees during the South African War.
Miemie Murray had herself become a founder member of a local
suffrage society, in Graaff-Reinet in the Eastern Cape. Although
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 255
Schreiner had repeatedly explained her position, this seems not to
have been understood as the root and branch fundamental objection
to a racist policy that it was. Thus a letter of invitation was sent to
Schreiner, to which hers responds.
The sixth and last letter is to Carpenter, from mid-1913 when
politics in South Africa had become more openly authoritarian and
anti-trades union, as well as highly racialized. A draconian government
response to strike action on the Rand had occurred, and a range of
racial legislation had come into effect, with the 1913 Natives Land
Act having been passed only a few weeks previously.

Letter extract 1 (OS to Betty Moltello, Jolzamlesbllrg, 12 Jlllle 18999)

- Dear One,
[...] A Dutch translation of my paper’°
by Reitz is being printed and
will be circulated among the burgers during the next weeks, while they
are deliberating on the president’s proposals. A French gentleman
here, Mr Boucher, has translated it into French, and it is being sent to
France today to be published through the French Consul here. If
Chamberlain and Rhodes mean to make war, of course they will make
it, and nothing we say or do will save us.
[...]I have been over at Pretoria for two days. They will do all they
can to keep peace, but they will fight if they must.
We are going to try to start a big peace organization here. Aren’t
there enough women in Cape Town interested in the matter who could
start one there? I’m feeling very dazed and dead, but if there were tteed
to come to life I could. I seem to have lost the power of sleeping or
eating, I never feel sleepy or hungry any more, like one feels when one
is watching at the bedside of one one loves. If everything were settled I
could sleep.

This extract is from a letter written from Johannesburg in the ZAR,

the centre of capitalist and ’uitlander’ (outsider) desire for control of
the Rand gold fields, during the run-up to the outbreak of war in
October 1899. In it, the category ’we’ is complicated and there are
several shifts in who and what it includes. At a simple level, this
letter is to Schreiner’s closest friend, and this is one aspect of ’we’ in
it. In addition, the ’nothing we say or do’ in its first paragraph
involves either the Boers (an exclusive group), and/or the anti-
capitalists (and so, non-exclusively, would include non-Boers as
well). ’They’ is both separate from ’we’ and also shifts into it at two
points: thus ’the burgers ... they’ becomes ’nothing we say or do’;
and ’they will fight if they must’ becomes ’we are going to start a ...

...

peace organisation’. ’We’ here also shifts meaning to indicate

women rather than men; and here the ’we are going to start a ... ...

peace organisation’ involves ’(all anti-war and also Boer anti-capitalist)

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256
women in Johannesburg’, and it potentially also includes Molteno
and Greene, women who were noted pacifists, with other like-minded
Cape Towners (and so presumptively English-speakers rather than
Boers).
As well as being contained within these shifting varieties of ’we’,
Schreiner also remains ’I’, a person who feels divorced or alienated
from her ordinary self by the events occurring, which she describes
as akin to ’watching at the bedside of one one loves’, waiting to know
whether they will live or die. And, as is typical in Schreiner’s letters,
the apparently impersonal pronoun ’one’ is used at moments of great
emotional and/or intellectual feeling, and confer authority and
momentousness to what she thus writes.

Letter extract 2 (OS to Will Sclzremer, Jolzall1lesbllrg, 28 Jmie 189911)

Dear Laddie,
[...]The panic has gone down here the last two days and shares are
up.
Prtzmto. Will, does it ever strike [you], I’m sure it must, it does come
to me often - in ten years’ time or five, if we live so long, looking back
will we see that it was best not to have fought now? I think and think
the matter over, and I cannot but feel that the immediate thing is to
work for peace [...]what little I can do is done on that side [...]If we
had the natives on our side it might perhaps be better to make the
stand now, we will have to make it one day - but our birds are coming
home to roost. Every act of injustice or oppression towards the black
man is tying our hands today. If the name Boer was a name to conjure

by among the natives of South Africa, if we knew they would stand by

us, we could meet the Capitalist now. As it is, war would be a
catastrophe so awful that one feels it an imperative duty to put it off as
long as possible. Whatever comes, war or no war, you men must stick to
yoirr plnces. You must give Chamberlain no chance of discharging you
as rebels. To throw up the sponge in case of war, would it seems to me
be suicidal. If you do nothing else you keep the men out who would
turn the full force of the volunteers upon us. I myself am not afraid that
we could not deal with the English troops except they were in the very

largest numbers, but with a squad of Eastern Province volunteers it

would be otherwise. What you men have to do is to sail on, and on, as
close to the wind as you can, and never give them a chance of turning
you out.

This letter was written to Will Schreiner from Johannesburg, just over
two weeks after her letter to Molteno. What is extracted here is the
’private’ (for Will alone) part of a ’public’ letter addressed to him, a
letter written in the knowledge it would be opened by Fan Schreiner
if her husband was away from home, would anyway be shown to her

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 257
and perhaps to members of her family staying with or visiting them,
and might also be passed round among mutual Cape Town friends.
In it, Schreiner considers what the future might bring, ’in ten years’
time or five’; and what the future might bring conditions her
comments on ’what little I can do’, with regard to ’work for peace
[...]what little I can do is done on that side’. The past also conditions
this, because it ties ’our hands’; and here this ’our’ and ’we’ is
implicitly either the Boers, and/or anti-capitalists more generally in
South Africa. And ’we’ and ’you’ also have a gender dimension to
them, for ’you’ involves Will and also ’you men’, with Schreiner
being outside of what men can do, for her comment about ’sail[ing]
[...]close to the [political] wind’ concerns people in public Cape
political life, who at that time could only be men. Indeed, perhaps
’you’ here has the even more specific meaning of the government of
the Cape headed by Will Schreiner as its Prime Minister. In addition,
’you’ concerns the Cape Colony in its dealings with ’us’, the ZAR. At
the same time, the mention of ’a squad of Eastern Province
volunteers’ suggests the existence of dissent within the Cape Colony,
between the ’you’ whom Chamberlain might discharge as rebels, and
those who would ’turn the full force of the volunteers upon us’ (that
is, ZAR). Finally, this letter also provides advice to Will regarding
political strategy and there is an implicit and unstated ’we’ within it
of ’you and I’ concerning this.
Across these two letters from 1899, membership of the category
’we’ shifts interestingly. It sometimes involves a private ’we’ between
Schreiner and Molteno, and Schreiner and Will Schreiner, but it
mainly concerns a public (but changing) notion of ’we’. It contains a
number of white groupings (English-speakers and Boers, capitalists
and anti-capitalists, women and men, Transvaalers and Cape Towners),
with some major although mainly elliptically-expressed differences
between them. However, few of these groupings are seen as fixed or
exclusive ones, for even the ’we’ of the Boers can incorporate anti-
capitalists and anti-imperialists more generally; and while explicitly
the ’you’ of men in public political life remains an exclusive
grouping, implicitly Schreiner’s letter is a transgressive act in which
both she and Will participate. And overall, Schreiner both belongs
and does not belong to the ’we’ categories she employs, for she is
apart from but also involved within both of the ’sides’ these
categories inscribe.
Letter extract 3 (OS to Edward Carpenter, Hanouer, 17 little 1904 13)
Dear Edward,
[...]I am so fond of Kaffirs, there’s a kind of natural affinity&dquo; between
me & them. And the capitalists are working for a big war with them

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258
soon, & we shall murder them right & lett. l hey will kill a good many
of us because they have been all armed & trained by the British during
the war, & England will be greatly surprised when the war comes at
what she has drawn on herself; but in the end the natives will be
crushed & the capitalist will have cheap native labour, when the tribal
& communal system which now prevents the employers from blood-
sucking them, is broken up. Besides some of their territories are rich in
mineral wealth & the white man wants it [...]
[...]You see Edward, the terrible point in our position in South
Africa now is that it’s not true. Since the ’peace’ came we, naturally, are
acting a part. We know perfectly well that we are not beaten, & that we
are going to conquer in the long run & that England will someday go
out bag & baggage, & yet we are all to act as if we didn’t know this [...]]
I think you can understand. I do not object to silence. But I do object to
protestations of loyalty to the King or the Empire, when we know we
are cursing them in our hearts. The curious thing to see is that England
can be taken in by it. This is private, Edward.
This letter to EdwardCarpenter has as its backcloth a set of political
events involving major differences within the Botha/Smuts govern-
ment around nationalist policies, with it becoming increasingly clear
that emergent Boer nationalism would be determinedly racial in its
premises and aspirations. Schreiner expresses a natural affinity with
’Kaffirs’, a particular grouping of black people in the white settler
states of South Africa, not least because ’the capitalists’ and ’we’ have
aggressive, indeed murderous, intentions towards them. Unlike her
fluid in/out relationship to ’[presumptively white] we’ categories,
Schreiner remains clearly outside of ’Kaffirs’, for ’we shall murder
them’; and she is also outside the category of ’natives’, whose
mineral-rich territories ’the white man’ wants. ’We’ in this extract
involves whites in South Africa, and also in its first paragraph it is
used of capitalists, although later it possibly also means the Boers
(’We know ... we are not beaten, & England will ... go out’) or
...

rather anti-capitalists more generally. Schreiner emphasizes her

ethical stance in a number of ways herein, in relation to black people,
the capitalists and employers, the white man, and also the ’not true’,
’acting a part’ position that ’we’ have adopted towards England. For
Schreiner, this not being true in ’our position’ is terrible because it is
untrue, false, acting a part; and she both belongs and does not belong
to the ’we’ who are doing so, as well as expressing moral and
political criticisms of it.
There are some interesting and important differences in ’we’ and
’they’ categories between this 1904 letter and the two dating from
June 1899. While having an affinity (marked by the shifts from
me/them, to we/them, to capitalists and employers/them, to white

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 259
man/them), Schreiner does not position herself
part of the ’they’ as

category, which she sees as both to capitalists

being ’other’,
specifically and to ’we [whites]’, and in the end being ’crushed’ by a
variety of means to create ’cheap native labour’ as well as release
’territories ... rich in mineral wealth’. Relatedly, here too Schreiner is
both distanced and implicated, as capitalists versus them becomes
we (whites) versus them. ’We’ and ’our’ are used to cover capitalists

working in concert with an unspecified ’we’ and ’our’, connoting the

implicit presence of whites, but also more specifically the Boers, the
majority whites who were already in de facto political charge and
were poised to take control of ’responsible government’ when
it came. Schreiner is both implicated, and also positions herself in
terms of a moral or ethical distance from but also engagement
with ’our position’ because it is ’not true’ and will have ’terrible’
consequences.

Letter extract 4 (OS to Mie11ll/! Murray, 2 October 191215)

Dear Mrs Murray,’6
[...]If I a little better I want so much to write a little letter
get
explaining the dear women of your union why I can’t join with them
to
great as is my sympathy with all women fighting to do away with any
sex disabilities. I feel so much that it is just the poorest & most helpless
women we have to fight for: not only for ollrsdves. In this country
native & coloured 17 women suffer much more from the mere fact they
are women than we do. We who are well educated, or are rich can do
much better with out the legal recognition of our state.

Schreiner prefaces her comments about the invitation sent via

Miemie Murray from the Graaff-Reinet society by brietly invoking
her health problems, articulating this through ’I’ and its ills. She then
distinguishes ’I’ from the ’them’ that is the ’dear women of your
society’ who had invited her. She starts by disassociating herself from
the ’we’ that is ’all women [who fight against] sex disabilities’, and
invokes a contrastive and different ’we [white] women’ category, one
conceived in ethical or moral terms as a ’we’ that does not fight for
itself, but instead for rights for those women who are the ’poorest &
most helpless’ - that is, ’native & coloured women’. The wider
category of ’we [white] women’ is explicitly positioned in terms of
being educated or rich, implicitly as neither the poorest nor helpless.
Being without ’the legal recognition of our state’ does not, then,
create an undifferentiated category of ’we women’ for Schreiner. She,
instead, insists upon clear material and political differences between
women who are native and coloured and so poorer and more helpless,
and those women who can act for others as well as themselves, even

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 260

though they do not have ’legal recognition’ and are excluded from
the franchise.
Alongside this, and as Miemie Murray would have been aware,
there is sub-text to Schreiner’s remarks which is all the more
a

powerfully ’there’ for being absent from explicit comment. This

concerns the fact that local suffrage societies such as the Graaff-
Reinet one had adopted a racial policy towards the franchise and
were no longer concerned with the plight of ’native & coloured
women’ and how this might be ameliorated if they received ’legal
recognition of our state’ by gaining the franchise together with white
women. Schreiner’s emphatic yet tactful insistence on making clear
her own stance is continued in Letter extract 5, written as a reply to
Miemie Murray’s response to her October 1912 letter.

Letter extract 5 (OS to Miemie Mllrray, 9 November 191i8)

Dear Mrs Murray,
[...]I hope you understood dear, my position. I send you a bit of
Earl Grey’s interview, as you may not have noticed it. You see, he feels
that the terrible manhood suffrage in the Transvaal & Freestate will
hang as a millstone about the neck of the South African government; I
believe it will yet batlic this land in blood, unless it is done away with. I
could not do anything that would strengthen it, as it would be
strengthened if women were enfranchised on the same evil & rotten
basis. I am for adult suffrage for all[,] free homogenous suffrage where
it means that e1>1>ri/ adult in that country will get a vote [...]Then I
would fight to the last gasp to undo that manhood franchise in the
Transvaal & Free State. How can I wish to strengthen it by adding
women to it?

Here Schreiner follows up her earlier letter by enclosing the cutting

of Grey’s speech on the racial basis of the franchise in the Transvaal
and Free State and uses this as a basis to outline a set of ’I’ statements
which constitute ’my position’. Using ’I’ to state her own position in
this strong form is actually rare in Schreiner’s post-1889 letters, and
she implies she has written in this way to ensure Miemie Murray will
this time correctly understand her views - her ’I hope you understood
dear’ comment is tantamount to saying that her friend had not.
There are four linked components within Schreiner’s ’position’ as
she presents this. Grey sees the racial basis of manhood suffrage in
the Transvaal and Free State - that is, only white men could have the
vote - as a ’millstone’ round the neck of the Union government;
while, in considerably stronger terms, she believes it will eventually
’br~the this land in blood’ because it is ’evil & rotten’. Schreiner could
not do anything to ’strengthen’ this (that is, encourage its extension

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 261
to the Cape and Natal within the Union), which is what would
if
happen women were added to it by being enfranchised on the
same terms (that is, the policy the suffrage societies had adopted).
Instead she supports a free and ’homogenous’ suffrage, one in which
all adults have the vote. She would fight to ’undo’ the Transvaal and
Free State manhood suffrage (the implication is that in practice she
cannot, because of the serious health problems Miemie Murray knew
about) and she could not do anything to strengthen it by adding
women to it (including by supporting the Graaff-Reinet society).
The last letter extract starts by employing some interesting - and
once more shifting - ’we’ and ’they’ categories around ’race’ matters

occurring at the time of writing. It then moves on to articulate some

’I’ statements, but in a very different way from those in her
November 1912 letter to Miemie Murray. In the latter, Schreiner had
articulated ’I’ to emphasize ’a position’ she held to someone who had
misunderstood her views and principles. In contrast, in her November
1913 letter to Edward Carpenter she instead simply outlines her
plans in the light of her health problems, which ’in the end’ might
mean these will be changed.

Letter extract 6 (OS to Ed7.uard Carpt’llter, 23 Jlily 191319)

Dear Edward,
[...]Iam sending you an account of our Sundays meeting. If you
want to understand the labour position out here read Bnlmsford’s
speech. If they shoot us down so the moment the zoliitt’ labourers strike,
what will it be whenever the natives move: & we are bringing more &
more oppressive laws against them. We have just passed a terrible native
land bill, the worst bit of work we have ever done for years. I will try
& send you a copy of my brother’s speech in the senate on it. It is
beautiful how liberal & broad & human he is growing as he grows older.
I am perhaps coming to England in December on my way to Florence
to try is [sic] a heart specialist there who has so greatly relieved my
friend Emily Hobhouse can do anything for me. I shall be only two
weeks or less in England as I can’t stand the climate of England in
winter, but I do hope I’ll see you Edward. In the end I may not be well
enough to leave; but it would be nice to see you all once more.
This letter was written a few weeks after the Natives Land Act
became law. Schreiner had become even more incapacitated by heart
problems than when she wrote her two letters to Miemie Murray
extracted above, while South African political life had moved
rightwards in a number of consequential ways. Carpenter shared
Schreiner’s socialist convictions, albeit in less radical ways, and their
mutual friends included people with strong trades union involvement
in Britain.

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The extract starts with Schreiner invoking a ’we’ group through
her ’our meeting’ comment; this ’we’ is then associated with a ’labour
position’ which has involved being shot down when striking by
’they’, presumptively a governmental ’they’ from what follows later.
This ’we’ is acknowledged to be white, and Schreiner anticipates
some unnamed - ’what will it be’ - but presumptively even more
forceful action being taken against black labourers if they strike.
At this point, the ’we’ becomes another white grouping, that of the
government, a ’[white] we’ that is bringing in more and more
oppressive laws against ’them’, that is, the ’native labourers’.
Interestingly, earlier Schreiner distances herself from the government
in her use of ’they’ to describe its shooting of white labourers, while
here in contemplating its probably even worse response to black
labourers she insists upon its whiteness and therefore underscores
her own unwilling complicity with its conduct. This ’we’ has just
passed a ’terrible native land bill’, and Schreiner clearly includes
herself in the ’we’ she castigates for the ’worst bit of work we have ...
done for years’. The contrast is drawn via her brother Will’s speech
against the Bill, and is provided by the ’liberal & broad & humane’,
which by implication constitutes another ’we’ grouping.
There is, then, a shift from these collective and impersonal categories
of ’we and they’ into the ’I and you’, the Olive and Edward of inter-
personal life. This ’I’ is the Olive Schreiner who might leave South
Africa in December to see a heart specialist in Italy; who couldn’t
stand the winter climate in England and so would be there for only
two weeks but hoped she might see Edward Carpenter during this
time. She also points out that ’In the end’, that is, when December
arrived, ’I’ might not be well enough to leave South Africa, but that
she wanted to ’see you all once more’. The ’once more’ here provides
an indication that she expected this to be the last time she would do
so (that is, that her heart problem had reached a terminal stage); and
the ’you all’ implies a collectivity of friends.

Some concluding thoughts on ’the eventful I’

In A Roorn of One’s Owrl, first published in 1929, Virginia Woolf
commented on what she thought was a notable feature of men’s
writing about women: that it tended to be relentlessly egotistical and
was often articulated through an ’autobiographical I’ inscribed in
such a way that it had particular and highly negative consequences
for the reader. She characterized this as:

a shadow that seemed to lie across the page [...] a shadow shaped
something like the letter ’I’. One began dodging this way and that to
catch a glimpse of the landscape behind it.20

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Woolf’s comment here focuses on the articulation of an ’I’ graphed in
and for itself. This is men’s writing under the sign of an ’I’ which
dominates and commands the text, and is thereby enabled to become
these things outside the text as well. This might well be dubbed ’the
male autograph’, for there are strong parallels between it and the
way that Domna Stanton21 has conceived ’the female autograph’ as
women writing the (woman’s) self into existence in autobiographical
texts. However, an important difference here is that Woolf is critical of
it on behalf of the reader, whose reading practices are dominated by
this male shadow of ’I’ across the page, while Stanton appropes of
such practices on behalf of the female writer.
In some contrast, rather than a strong ’I’ lying across the pages of
Olive Schreiner’s letters and hiding the landscape of events behind
narrowly textual matters, there seems rather the elision of ’I’ in a
strong personal sense, and overall her letters are actually better
characterized as letters about the landscape, a landscape containing
figures engaging with events. ’The eventful I’ is a term which
usefully characterizes the relationship between self and ’landscape’
in Schreiner’s letters and their commentaries on ’race’ matters in
South Africa. In her letters there is a complicated and often painful
scrutiny of the changing dimensions of, and possible futures for, ’the
landscape’ of South Africa at the time of writing and also in the
future. Also ’I’ is located within, and also without, a range of ’we’
positions and Schreiner’s relationship to these shifts within the
course of a letter as well as over time. ’We’ is raced and gendered and
also troubled and internally fractured in other ways as well for
Schreiner, and her relationship to the various ’we’ categories she
employs is typically one of not/belonging, and becomes increasingly
ambivalent or shifting over time. Although often she disapproves
and draws her distance from this ’we’ and always positions it as a
raced category, nonetheless she recognizes she is a part of it, in the
sense of being implicated in and having responsibility for what is
done in its name. There is no moral high ground of ’I’m different’,
although there is a drawing of moral distance - and thus perhaps
’not/belonging’ is a good way of describing her (ontological as well
as ethical) position.
epistolary ’I’ writes through contrastive categories of ’we’ and
This
’they’ and, although having strong affinities and sympathies outside
of ’we’, does not inhabit or colonize the racialized other. Moreover,
this is an ’I’ conceived in relationship with a wide cross-section of
other people, organized around the letter-writer’s perceptions of
human need in concert with the pull of affect, emotion, towards her
particular correspondents. At the same time, Schreiner’s letters are
written from a perspective: they take up an ethical and political

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position and they are written evaluatively from it; but this is

overwhelmingly a collective position, a categorical one, and one

which also shifts, sometimes within one letter, one paragraph, even
one sentence, as well as markedly so over time.

Paradoxically, Schreiner presents more straighforwardly ’personal’

information about herself in her theoretical and analytical writings
than she does in her ostensibly ’private’ writing in her letters. This
raises questions about how to think about and conceptualize public/
private in relation to Schreiner’s formal writing as well as in connection
with her letters. Certainly Schreiner’s letters are an expression of a
relationship between her and the recipient and are to be seen as
’moments’ within an ongoing exchange between her and them.
However, this relationship is conceived and inscribed in political and
ethical terms in relation to the world of events, of ’the actual course
of things’; these are the terms of engagement and provide the
landscape or grounding for the epistolary relationship.
’I’ is certainly present in the post-1889 letters, although mainly by
being positioned around ’we’ categories and the changing relationship
of these to the ’events in the landscape’; that is, ’I’ generally has to be
adduced from ’we’. There are some additional ways in which ’I’ is
inscribed, for instance, in relation to developing and outlining ’a
position’, and in the more personal accounting of ill-health. However,
in terms of Schreiner’s extant letters as a whole, of greater conse-
quentiality is her fascinating deployment of the impersonal pronoun
’one’. On one level a distancing device which rendered apparently
impersonal what was actually personal and connected with ’I’,
almost invariably its use indicates the inscription of ’private’ and
highly personal information and comment. However, in her ’race’
letters, the use of ’one’ occurs relatively infrequently - perhaps an
indication of how she saw ’the personal’ in relation to these political
concerns.
One way of reading Schreiner’s ’race’ letters is to argue that
therein is a displacement of the personal within the public, perhaps
to be interpreted as an inability to inscribe ’I’ except in certain specific
ways (as the exposition of a political position, through an account of
bodily ill-health, by means of the distancing device of impersonal
forms). Against this, I read them as bringing home ’the public’,
indeed as refusing the binary ’public/private’ because concerned
with the grounding of self in an ethics of action, sympathy, affinity,
justice and in inter-relation with others. In this, they are highly
distinctive, fascinating, one of the most important grounded feminist
interrogations of ’race’ matters, and provide a unique feminist
analysis of capitalism in its imperialist mode in Southern Africa.

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END NOTES
1. Schreiner’s main published work includes the publications listed in the
References.
2. Cronwright-Schreiner 1924, Rive 1988.
3. Draznin 1992.
4. What became ’South Africa’ in 1910 consisted of two Boer (or farmer) settler
states (the Zuid Afrikansche Republiek (ZAR), otherwise known as the Transvaal,
and the Orange Free State), and two British colonies, the Cape Colony and Natal.
5. The comments on Schreiner’s letters herein are underpinned by work in progress
in editing a new Olive Schreiner letters for publication. They also reflect a
longstanding interest in Schreiner’s social theory across the various genres she
wrote in (Stanley 1992, 2000, 2001, 2002). For other useful accounts of Schreiner’s
ideas and life, see Berkman 1989, Burdett 2001, Clayton 1997, First & Scott 1980,
McClintock 1995.
6. Broughton 2000.
7. The largely neutral contemporary meaning of such terms of course no longer
exists, and now most of them have highly offensive connotations which I fully
recognize.
8. In her letters as well as many of her published writings, Schreiner’s mode of

expression was politically performative, to persuade or cajole her readers into

responding in a better way by appealing to self-interest in terms they would
understand. Consequently disentangling her argumentative tactics and her ’real
views’ is difficult.
9. Olive Schreiner Collection BC 16, University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa
(in all extracts, emphasis as original).
10. This is Schreiner’s anti-war polemic, An English South African’s View of the
Situation (1899), which rapidly appeared in a number of languages; once war was
declared, she withdrew it from publication so as not to capitalize from war.
11. Schreiner Collection BC 16, UCT.
12. This was her favoured name for her much-loved younger brother.
13. Olive Schreiner Collection, National English Literary Museum (NELM),
Grahamstown, South Africa.
14. As her use of this phrase suggests, Goethe was a favourite author of Schreiner’s.
15. Schreiner Collection, NELM.
16. Schreiner continued to address many people she was close to in this formal way,
and they her, even Betty Molteno, and she did not use personal names until some
years after they had become close friends.
17. In South Africa, ’coloured’ is not a euphemism for mixed race, but rather refers to
a group of people of a specific historical descent.
18. Schreiner Collection, NELM.
19. Schreiner Collection, NELM.
20. Woolf 1989: 95.
21. Stanton 1984.

REFERENCES
Berkman, Joyce Avrech (1989). The Healing Imagination of Olive Schreiner Beyond South
African Colonialism (Oxford: Plantin Publishers).
Broughton, Trev (2000). ’Auto/biography and the actual course of things’, in Tess
Cosslett, Celia Lury and Penny Summerfield (eds), Women’s Autobiographical
Selves (London: Routledge), 241-6.
Burdett, Carolyn (2001). Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism Evolution, Gender,
Empire (London: Palgrave).

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266
Clayton, Cherry (1997). Olive Schreiner (New York: Twayne Publishers; Twayne’s
World Authors Series).
Cronwright-Schreiner, Samuel (ed.) (1924). The Letters of Olive Schreiner 1876-1920
(London: Fisher Unwin).
Draznin, Claire Yaffa (1992). My Other Self: The Letters of Olive Schreiner and Havelock
Ellis 1884-1920 (New York: P. Lang).
First, Ruth and Scott, Ann (1980). Olive Schreiner : A Biography (London: Andre
Deutsch).
McClintock, Anne (1995). Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial
Context (London: Routledge).
Rive, Richard (ed.) (1988). Olive Schreiner Letters: Volume 1 1871-1899 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press).
Schreiner, Olive (1883). The Story of an African Farm (London: Chapman and Hall).
—

(1890). Dreams (London: Unwin).

—

(1893). Dream Life and Real Life

, A Little African Story (London: Unwin).
—

(1896). The Political Situation (London: Unwin, London).

—

(1897). Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (London: Unwin).

—
. Words In Season (London:
(1899). An English South African’s View of The Situation
Hodder and Stoughton).
—(1909). Closer Union (London: Fifield).
—

(1911). Woman and Labour (London: Unwin).

— (1921). ’The Dawn of Civilisation’, Nation and Antheneum, 26 March 1921.
—

(1923a). Thoughts on South Africa (London: Unwin, London).

—

). Stories
b
(1923 , Dreams And Allegories (London: Unwin).
—

(1926). From Man to Man; Or, Perhaps Only... (Unwin, London).

—

(1929). Undine (London: Ernest Benn).

Stanley, Liz (1992). ’How Olive Schreiner vanished, leaving behind only her asthmatic
personality’, in The Auto/Biographical I: The Theory and Practice of Feminist
Auto/Biography (Manchester: Manchester University Press), 181-213.
(2000). ’Encountering the imperial and colonial past through Olive Schreiner’s
—

Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, Women’s Writing, 7, 197-219.

(2001). ’Mimesis and metaphor in the interpretation of lives: holding out an
—

Olive branch to Schreiner criticism’, Women’s History Review, 9 (1), 27-50.

, Labour &
(2002). Imperialism
—

the New Woman: Olive Schreiner’s Social Theory

(Durham, UK: sociologypress).
Stanton, Domna (1984). ’Autogynography: is the subject different’, in The Female
Autograph (New York: Stanford University Press), 3-20.
Woolf, Virginia (1929/1989). A Room of One’s Own (London: Granada Publishing Ltd).

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