Olive Schreiner in threes
In Roman times and earlier, a crossroads was the meeting of three roads, not the present four. And in Britain in somewhat closer earlier times when most people used public transport, there was a saying that you waited for ages for a bus to appear and then three came along at once. Three is clearly a propitious number! It would seem that it recurs with things to do with Olive Schreiner as well. On Tuesday this week I was looking at old email concerned with Olive Schreiner and her letters, received as part of the activities of the Olive Schreiner Letters Online project. One of these was from a well-known collector of all things Schreiner. Yesterday, Wednesday, entirely coincidentally the same well-known collector contacted me about a new ‘missing‘ Schreiner letter that had been purchased. This morning, Thursday, as I went through email with my first cup of coffee, low and behold there was an email from another collector with a scan and a transcription of yet another Schreiner letter. And the even more propitious and slightly odd aspect of this is that all three of these concerns the same correspondent that Olive Schreiner had written to, Mary Sauer. Something has been shaken and stirred in the universe concerning Olive Schreiner – and if I believed in such things I would say this is because it is unnervingly close to the centenary date of her death in 1920.

Last updated: 3 December 2020