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Letters have sometimes been assumed to be a private form of life writing, and certainly many of the South African writer Olive Schreiner’s (1855–1920) letters have been read in this way. However, her letters trouble any simple, binary notions of public and private. This article offers a re-reading of Schreiner’s letters to the statistician and founder of the Men and Women’s Club, Karl Pearson (1857–1936). It argues that the dominant reading that has been made of these letters as ‘unrequited love letters’ needs rethinking, for when these letters are considered in their entirety and contextualised as part of Schreiner’s wider extant letters, and when the intertwining of their public and private aspects is recognised, it becomes clear that a considerably more complex interpretation of her letters is required, and that this has implications for reading letters more generally.

This article explores the letters of South African feminist writer Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) to illuminate connections and tensions between suffrage movements in the imperial metropole and on the colonial periphery. Schreiner's letters shed fascinating light on how she used her contacts in the global suffrage movement to advance local suffrage work. They indicate key differences Schreiner identified between the British and South African suffrage movements, including that the latter should be focused on educating women to want the vote. Schreiner's emphasis on universal suffrage also brought her into conflict with local suffrage organisations which were willing to accept a racial franchise, and also with key figures in the international suffrage movement.

This paper concerns eight women's testimonies produced over a period of some fifty years, which describe a protest about meat rations at Brandfort concentration camp in November 1901, during the 1899-1902 South African War. The focus here is not the ‘event itself’, which cannot now be recovered except in its archival or documentary forms, but on the subsequent re/telling of this incident, and on the politicised, (proto-) nationalist content and tone of the Brandfort protest testimonies. While proto-nationalism is present from the earliest extant testimony, the development of this is traced over time, showing how the later testimonies evince a strongly triumphalist nationalist tone. The retrospectively inscribed testimonies of the protest are examined to show how, over time, the story of the Brandfort protest became universalised, retold well away from specificities of time and place. If nationalism depends on the creation of 'stories that find their place', then it was partly through the construction and repetition of what Van Heyningen has called 'costly mythologies' about women's concentration camp experiences that Afrikaner national unity was achieved. This also supports Bradford's important claim that the 1899-1902 war regendered Afrikaner nationalism.

Focusing on the letters of the South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), this article explores Schreiner's strategic uses of letter-writing as a key tool in her work as a cultural entrepreneur in a number of different social and political contexts. In advocating a microhistory approach which recognizes that macro and micro are interconnected and should be seen as lenses of perspective rather than as separate spheres, we examine various strands of Schreiner's ‘cultural project’ and consider how her epistolary activities articulated and furthered this.

Programmatic ideas regarding cultural sociology and its inter-relationship with cultural production inspired by the work of Inglis et al., Mukerji and Bennett are explored. A particular cultural assemblage, the editorial practices arising in an interdisciplinary project concerned with researching and publishing the letters of South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner, is detailed. Four key aspects of the particular ‘bringing-into-being’ which these working practices involve are interrogated, regarding the ‘moment of writing’, archive stories, the ‘editorial moment’ and the involvement of the later reader, with these examined in depth in relation to examples of Schreiner’s letters.

There are disturbances as well as regularities in the gender order, including challenges to and re-workings of conventional hierarchies. An example of such re-workings provides the focus of discussion: the political interventions of South African feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (18551920). Discussion of Schreiners letters to a number of important white political figures is organised around an epistemological question: can Schreiners political influencewithin the masculine political landscape of the Cape in the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries be convincingly demonstrated by concrete epistolary examples and compelling evidence? Discussed here regarding womens presence in a masculine political landscape, this epistemological question exercises historiography more generally: with what certainty can knowledgeclaims about the past be advanced? The ideas context in which these questions are explored is feminist historiography concerning gender and in particular separate spheres, which were particularly troubled and complex in the South African context. We argue that the performative dimensions of letter writing need to be encompassed within notions of influence and proof, rather than this being conceived as always lying outside the text: texts and words can have powerful effects, with the evidence in Schreiners case pointing strongly to her significant political influence. Chapters © 2013 The Authors. Book compilation © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

The Olive Schreiner Letters Project (OSLP) is making use of ‘personal papers’ associated with, amongst a number of other important concerns, the history of Southern Africa, and doing so in an innovative way. The OSLP is transcribing and analysing all of the extant letters of the feminist, social theorist and writer Olive Schreiner (1855-1920), and will contribute theoretically and methodologically to the use of letters and other epistolary materials in social science and humanities research. In addition, the project will publish in digital format transcripts of the complete Schreiner letters, which will be free access. The project is funded by the ESRC (RES-062-23-1286), and is multi-site, led by principal investigator Professor Liz Stanley, and with research and technical teams based at the universities of Edinburgh, Leeds Metropolitan and Sheffield.

Re-reading as a methodology is often invoked in literary and historical work, but seldom specifically delineated. The substantive focus herein concerns Boer women's testimonies of the 1899—1902 South African War, in particular testimonies of the British military scorched earth policy of forced removals and concentration camps. The methodology of re-reading such texts against each other is explored so as to `re-read the record' of the Mafeking concentration camp, using a set of unpublished testimonies. Re-reading reveals tensions and disjunctures in these testimonies, and highlights the pervasiveness of established, rehearsed narrative structures which characterize in effect all women's testimonies of the concentration camps of the South African War. The processes of re-reading are examined as a methodology which interrogates a particular text's context of production, and, crucially, the context of reading and the ways in which this shapes readerly responses to the text.

Women cultural entrepreneurs were busy in promoting the development of proto-nationalism in South Africa in the aftermath of the 1899–1902 South African War. The work of some key cultural entrepreneurs who solicited and published women's testimonies about the wartime concentration camps instituted by the British military provides the focus of discussion. Boer testimonies were presented as factual ‘I-witness’ statements; they also followed a proto-nationalist line and were published and distributed in women's nationalist networks, playing an important part in everyday forms of state formation from 1902 to 1940. During this period, the making of Afrikaner ethnic identity was symbiotic with the making of proto-nationalism and then nationalism with cultural politics mapping closely on to state formation. Within this, women's role as cultural entrepreneurs and political brokers was crucial, with the centrality of the concentration camp deaths within a mythologised ‘history of Afrikanerdom’ resulting from their...

Diary writing is popularly defined around assumptions about the temporal and spatial circumstances of writing, which underpin the kind of knowledge diaries are often understood to “hold.” The epistemological status of diaries is rooted in an assumed ontology, concerning the time/space of their writing and the temporal location of their writer in relation to “entries” in them.This article explores “what happens” to the knowledge a diary is seen to hold when its ontological basis is disturbed by its assumed “present-ness” being shown to be an artful (mis)representation. The case study discussed concerns the published diary Het Concentratie-Kamp van Irene (The Irene Concentration Camp, 1905), as well as the manuscript diary, and the letters written concurrently with the preparation of the former for publication, of a South African woman, Johanna Brandt-Van Warmelo. The diary deals with the author's experiences during six weeks spent as a volunteer worker in Irene concentration camp during the 1899–1...

This discussion aims to provide ‘a genuine historicisation … that counters the tendency to treat twentieth-century practices as a prism through which to interpret … previous centuries' concerning a...

Sport, Leisure and Culture in Twentieth-Century Britain JEFFREY HILL, 2002 Basingstoke: Palgrave. xi + 241 pp., ISBN 0 333 72687 1, $15.99.

(2012). The Epistolary Pact, Letterness. a/b: Auto/Biography Studies: Vol. 27, No. 2, pp. 262-293.

Globalization theory sees the processes of change it is concerned with as distinctively new, with a feminist analytics part of the newness of the current period too, focusing on some of the specific gender dynamics involved. However, the work of the feminist writer and social theorist Olive Schreiner (1855–1920) challenges, indeed overturns, such assumptions. Similar structural economic and political circumstances to those now called globalization were the focus of Schreiner's theorising, with her work demonstrating that ‘it's been done before’ in the case of a feminist analytics of global social change. Also, Schreiner's feminist interrogation of global change refused any confinement to gender (although it encompassed it), because for her gender was always already interconnected with class, ‘race’ and an array of wider structural forces and changes. Schreiner's unfolding analysis of imperialism and the expansionist project in the period 1888 to 1913, and of war, peace and social movements in the period 1914 to 1920, are discussed, in particular by presenting new material from Schreiner's extant letters and exploring the significant ways these add to the analysis in her published work. Over 4000 Schreiner letters are extant, are being researched by the Olive Schreiner Letters Project ( www.oliveschreinerletters.ed.ac.uk ), and provide an unparalleled resource for exploring the emergent analysis of a key feminist theorist.

Tilly extols the power and compass of 'superior stories' compared with 'standard stories'; however, in life things are not always so clear cut. A 1906 1914 research investigation headed by P. L. A. Goldman, initially concerned with the enumeration and commemoration of the deaths of Boer combatants during the South African War (1899-1902), later with the deaths of people in the concentration camps established in the commando phase of this war, is explored in detail using its archived documents. Now largely forgotten, the investigation was part of a commemorative project which sought to replace competing stories about wartime events with one superior version, as seen from a proto-nationalist viewpoint and harnessed to the wider purpose of nation-building. Goldman, the official in charge, responded to a range of methodological and practical difficulties in dealing with a huge amount of data received from a wide variety of sources, and made ad hoc as well as in principle decisions regarding how to handle these, and eventually producing 'the number' as politically and organisationally required. However, another number of the South African War concentration camp dead - one which was both different and also added up incorrectly - concurrently appeared on a national women's memorial, the Vrouemonument, and it is this which has resounded subsequently. The reasons are traced to the character of stories and their power, and the visibility of stories about the concentration camp deaths in question the face of the Vrouemonument and their anonymity in Goldman's production of 'the number'. Tilly's idea of an 'in-between' approach to stories is drawn on in exploring this.