Olive Schreiner’s letters and whites writing whiteness

There are now over 5000 Olive Schreiner letters written between 1870 and 1920 that have been published through the Olive Schreiner Letters Project, with the new collection reported on in a recent blog adding well over 200 to the total. Schreiner was part of a number of intertwined family configurations in South Africa. These include the overlapping Hemming, Findlay and Brown as well as Schreiner families, with their letter-writing starting in the 1790s and finishing in the 1930s. The plan is for her letters to be integrated within the WWW databases with particular attention to the ways in which she writes about matters of race and ethnicity over the 50 year period for which there are extent letters. This will be done in a way that provides links to the full transcriptions in the Olive Schreiner Letters Online (oliveschreiner.org) as well as makes available additional material regarding these important matters of her developing race politics. What this will look like all depends on the VRE being developed by the wonderful HRIonline at the University of Sheffield. The action here will commence in April, we hope, and there will be blogs on developments in due course.

Last updated: 25 February 2016