LETTERS: A trove of letters to her publisher, WITH Souls of Black Folk WITH Three Dreams in a Desert.
A Trove of Letters to her American Publisher
Schreiner, Olive. Autograph note, signed “Olive Schreiner,” Matjesfontein, Apr. 25, 1892.
One 9” x 7” leaf of beige paper, folded vertically, recto only covered; mildly soiled.
Together with:
Schreiner, Samuel Cronwright. Six autograph letters and one autograph postcard, signed “S.C. Cronwright Schreiner” to Messrs. Roberts Bros., Cape Colony, 1895.
8vo.; eight leaves; blank and lined paper; rectos only covered with one exception; some minor chips and tears; two letters repaired with tape.
Together with:
Additional items of Schreiner ephemera, including a check stub bearing her name, a page torn out of an unknown book with a facsimile of a note in Schreiner’s hand on the verso, a black-and-white portrait of Schreiner with a facsimile of her signature, a review of The Letters of Olive Schreiner (1925) from the Boston Evening Transcript, and a handful of other correspondence from the Roberts Brothers files relating to Schreiner dating back to 1890.
The autograph note by Schreiner acknowledges receipt of payment from Roberts Bros. and mentions an upcoming trip to the States. The brief note, signed twice by Schreiner, reads in full:
Received with thanks from Roberts Bro. the sum of £ 15/17/5.
I am coming to America in May & shall hope to see you and make arrangements with
regard to more books.
Cronwright’s letters to Roberts Bros., none of which are addressed to a specific individual and all one-to-three pages in length, mostly pertain to copyright issues and royalty payments for his wife’s various books. In a letter dated April 22, 1895, Cronwright mentions the involvement of Mr. Watt, a London-based agent who assisted Schreiner until her husband took over the job. He writes, “I should in all cases, following my wife’s wish, prefer dealing direct with you, but am afraid that, in the matter of ‘Dream Life,’ payments will have to be made through Mr. Watt, as he has had a good deal to do with the matter.”
The longest letter, dated October 7, 1895, primarily concerns a cache of articles written by Schreiner on the political climate in South Africa:
[Olive] wishes you to secure copyright in her name in America, & then to arrange, on the most remunerative terms you can, for the publication of these articles in an American periodical. For this she will pay you a commission of 10 per cent on what the articles realise [sic] … After the last of these articles has appeared in the periodical, she wishes to publish the lot in book form … Mrs. Schreiner sends her kind regards, and says she would be so much obliged to you if you would send her a copy of the American Copyright Act, with any remarks or details you may think necessary.
Curiously, the volume of articles and essays on South Africa to which Cronwright is referring was not published in Schreiner’s lifetime. It is unclear whether this is because Roberts Bros. rejected the terms laid out in this letter or if Schreiner put the project on hold for other reasons. Cronwright published the aforementioned work, Thoughts on South Africa, in 1923, three years after Schreiner’s death.
Cronwright takes a break from discussing business briefly to report that his wife is “at present in excellent health” and after the articles have been sent off for publication, she “will get to work revising the novel about which I wrote to you” (presumably Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland, which Roberts Bros. published in 1897). He also asks if they have published anything on Angora goat farming and in a subsequent letter, dated November 4, requests they send him a copy of John L. Hayes’s The Angora Goat, saying, “I am very anxious to have this book.”
Three letters in the archive to Roberts Bros., from September and October 1890, are from Schreiner’s London publisher, T. Fisher Unwin. Unwin mentions Schreiner’s soon-to-be-published book Dreams, which he happily reports “has already been referred to in the American press.” In a letter dated September 25, Unwin discusses book rights, which he says he will maintain even after Roberts Bros. publishes the American edition. Unwin and Roberts Bros. did reach an agreement, and the American edition of Dreams came out in 1891.
Samuel Cronwright (1863-1936) was a politically active ostrich farmer who met Schreiner in December 1892 when they both were campaigning against a bill that would allow black workers to be flogged for minor offenses. After they married in 1894, Cronwright took Schreiner’s name and abandoned his own career to help further hers, acting as her agent and communicating with her publishers in London and Boston. After her death, Cronwright published a biography, The Life of Olive Schreiner, and edited a collection of her letters. Despite specifications in her will about which of her remaining manuscripts could be published posthumously, Cronwright published everything he could profit from, even her unfinished first novel Undine that Schreiner gave to Havelock Ellis in 1884, which she later wished she had destroyed. Cronwright recovered the manuscript from Ellis and published it in 1929, claiming that he had recovered the missing ending, but scholars agree that the published ending was not written by Schreiner.
An interesting archive revealing how Olive Schreiner’s writing was introduced to American readers.
(#11305c)
Rare Suffrage Tract
Schreiner, Olive. Three Dreams in a Desert. Woman suffrage leaflet. Published fortnightly by the American Woman Suffrage Association at 3 Park Street, Boston. Vol. II. No. 27. September 1, 1889.
8vo.; printed leaf folded to make four pages; creased horizontally from folding; a few minor tears. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First separate printing of Schreiner’s feminist allegorical tale, which first appeared in Fortnightly Review in 1887. “Three Dreams in a Desert” was also included in Schreiner’s 1890 collection, Dreams.
In the introduction to Woman and Labor (1911), Schreiner explained, “The allegory ‘Three Dreams in a Desert’ which I published about nineteen years ago was taken from this book; and I have felt that perhaps being taken from its context it was not quite clear to every one.” Apparently, Schreiner removed “Three Dreams” and several other allegories in order to streamline Woman and Labor’s message. According to Carol Barash, “Three Dreams” grew out of Schreiner’s work in London in the 1880s and can be interpreted as “an articulation in another form of ‘The Woman Question’”(101).
In the story, Schreiner describes three dreams she has one afternoon. In the first, she encounters two “huge creatures” bound together, one standing and one lying prostrate in the sand. She asks a fellow traveler about the beast lying down and he responds, “This is woman; she that bears men in her body.” He goes on:
The oldest, oldest, oldest man living here has never seen her move; the oldest, oldest book records that she lay here then, as she lies here now. But listen! Older than the oldest book, older than the oldest recorded memory of man, on the Rocks of Language, on the hard-baked clay of Ancient Customs, now crumbling to decay, are found the marks of her footsteps. Side by side with his who stands beside her you may trace them; and you know that she who now lies there once wandered free over the rocks with him….Ages ago the Age-of-dominion-of-muscular force found her, and when she stooped low to give suck to her young, and her back was broad, he put his burden of subjection on to it, and tied it on with the broad band of Inevitable Necessity….Ever since she has lain here.
Schreiner asks why no one will help her, and her companion explains that “she must help herself” and that only by working together can the man and woman move.
In the second dream, Schreiner witnesses a conversation between a woman in the desert and Reason, an old man. The woman says she is seeking “the land of Freedom” and Reason explains that it is right in front of her, but that she must travel “down the banks of Labor, through the water of Suffering” to get there. Reason tells her she must also leave behind the baby boy whom she is nursing, and she reluctantly does so. She then begins her journey with the understanding that even if she does not successfully ford the water, her body can be a part of the bridge for others.
The final dream begins with a vision of “brave women and brave men,” walking hand-in-hand.
And I said to him beside me, “What place is this?”
And he said, “This is heaven.”
And I said, “Where is it?”
And he answered, “On earth.” And I said, “When shall these things be?”
And he answered, “IN THE FUTURE.”
Schreiner awakens with a renewed sense of hope and as the sun sets, she feels content knowing that “the next day he would arise again.”
Despite her short list of publications, Schreiner (1855-1920) is hailed as the founder of South African literature, and an early force in feminism. She published a semi-autobiographical novel, The Story of an African Farm (1883), for which she continues to be best-known, under the pseudonym Ralph Iron, and which was hailed by contemporary critics as a sensitive expression of a thinking woman’s perspective on religion, marriage, and other social topics. Schreiner’s concern with social issues, the secondary status of women, and the racism of her native South Africa would continue to serve as the focus of her work, both in fiction and nonfiction. The Story of an African Farm’s success was immediate and wide spread, engaging a substantial readership in both Europe and the United States. Two collections of stories, dreams, and allegories were published in 1890 and 1893. In 1911, Schreiner published Woman and Labor, which she had been working on for more than two decades. The book addressed Schreiner’s concern that women were becoming socially displaced – no longer expected to be wives and mothers, but not welcome in the workplace either. Two lesser novels, and a collection of stories edited by her husband, were posthumously published. Literary critic Gerard Monsman credits her with influencing William Plomer, Isak Dinesen, Virginia Woolf, Alan Paton, Doris Lessing, and Nadine Gordimer. He writes,
[H]er most significant legacy was a concern with personal relationships, manners, and values that lifted British colonial fiction from the mediocrity of hunters’ tales, native uprisings, and hairbreadth escapes to a tough-minded depiction of the political character of colonialism, the clash between indigenous ways of life, and the march of capitalistic development. Hardly less significant were her brief allegories—surreal and fuguelike word paintings that only just fell short of poetry…
Cherry Clayton’s assessment is superlative; she declares that Schreiner’s name “has become synonymous with an embattled, visionary feminism”; that her allegory “Three Dreams in a Desert” and Woman and Labor “gave passionate expression to feminist issues and inspired many sympathetic readers”; and that “her eloquent political pamphlets published at key moments of South African history, such as during the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) and the establishment of the Union of South Africa (1910), marked her as a concerned English South African who tried to marry the best of English liberal traditions to indigenous social and political structures.”
The American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) was formed in Boston in 1869 by Lucy Stone, Julia Ward Howe, and Josephine Ruffin. Less militant that NWSA, the women who ran AWSA were only concerned with suffrage and did not campaign for other issues such as divorce rights or wage discrimination. In addition to regularly printing leaflets like this one, ASWA published its own journal, The Woman’s Journal, which featured articles written by members and cartoons drawn by female artists. The last page of this leaflet contains titles of other available singe and double leaflets “(No Distinction of Sex in the Right to Vote,” “Woman Suffrage Essential to a True Republic”), many written by notable suffragists and social reformers including Stone, Mary A. Livermore, Ednah D. Cheney, Frances Power Cobbe, Lillie Devereaux Blake, Henry Ward Beecher and William Lloyd Garrison, Jr. Eventually, it became clear that it was not beneficial to have two competing suffrage organizations; in 1890, AWSA and NWSA merged to become NAWSA.
An incredible find of Schreiner’s most overtly feminist allegory; OCLC locates one copy.
(#11305b)
Barash, Carol, ed. An Olive Schreiner Reader: Writings on Women and South Africa. London: Pandora Press, 1987.
Clayton, Cherry. African Writers Volume Two. New York: Scribner’s, 1997.
DLB Volume 156: British Short-Fiction Writers, 1880-1914: The Romantic Tradition. The Gale Group, 1996, pp. 301-311.
Schreiner’s Signed Copy of DuBois’s Seminal Work
(Schreiner, Olive) DuBois, W.E. Burghardt. The Souls of Black Folk. Essays and sketches. London: Archibald Constable & Co., Ltd., 1905.
8vo.; black cloth, stamped in gilt.
First British edition from American sheets, with a cancel title page bearing Constable’s imprint and with the frontispiece portrait of DuBois absent. Signed twice in black ink on the front pastedown and front endpaper: Olive Schreiner. The front endpaper appears to have been removed from another book of Schreiner’s and professionally bound into this copy with tape; the leaf is slightly offset with the faint suggestion of another bookplate (not Smith’s). With W.H. Smith & Son’s Subscription Library bookplate affixed to the front pastedown. Schreiner’s name has also been written across the topedge by one of Smith’s staff.
With occasional annotations by Schreiner in the latter half of the book; chapters XI (“Of the Passing of the First Born”) and XII (“Of Alexander Crummell”) bear “X” marks on the first pages of the chapters and in the margins, Schreiner drew vertical lines alongside some passages, perhaps to denote their significance.
At the outbreak of the Boer War in 1899, Schreiner was living in Hanover, a Cape interior town under martial law. An outspoken critic of British imperialism, Schreiner’s sympathies were with the Transvaal government and she became known as a “pro-Boer.” After the war, she continued to be involved with the African cause, further divorcing herself from white politics. According to biographer Carolyn Burdett, it was in this post-war period that Schreiner “enthusiastically read W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk” (13) as well as texts by Gandhi and Haitian revolutionaries such as Toussaint L’Ouverture. She and her brother Will became involved with the National Convention and lobbied unsuccessfully for a division of South Africa based on a federal, as opposed to a unitary, structure. In 1910, however, white South Africa formalized its government and the racial segregation that Schreiner fiercely hated became legally institutionalized. Blacks and other minorities remained disenfranchised until 1983. In 1913, Schreiner moved to England and only returned to South Africa once more, in August 1920, four months before her death.
(#11305a)
Burdett, Carolyn. Olive Schreiner and the Progress of Feminism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
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