Olive Schreiner in Rhodesia: an episode in a biography
- Authors: Walters, Paul S , Fogg, W Jeremy M
- Date: 2007
- Language: English
- Type: text , Article
- Identifier: vital:6123 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004707
- Description: Readers of biographies of Olive Schreiner - except for the pioneering work of Vera Buchanan-Gould (see 1948, 198-99) - could be forgiven for doubting whether Olive Schreiner ever was in Rhodesia. Although her husband's edition of her Letters includes three which cover this journey (Cronwright-Schreiner 1924a), he makes no mention of it in his Life (1924), and it is not touched on either in First and Scott (1980) or in Stanley's impressive biographical chapter (2002). Arguably, it does nothing to alter the by now well-established outlines of Olive Schreiner's life; yet, as we shall see, the visit itself might have meant the premature end of that life. Moreover, it documents Schreiner's visit to two sites of immense importance to her : the 'Hanging Tree' in Bulawayo which features in the (deliberately shocking) photographic frontispiece to the first edition of Trooper Peter Halket of Mashonaland (1897), and, secondly, Cecil Rhodes's grave in the Matopos. In just over a decade (13 Aug. 1921), she too would lie in her chosen mountaintop tomb.
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- Date Issued: 2007
Olive Schreiner at 150: some thoughts on re-editing Cronwright's The Reinterment on Buffelskop
- Authors: Walters, Paul S , Fogg, W Jeremy M
- Date: 2006
- Language: English
- Type: text , Article
- Identifier: vital:6124 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1004708
- Description: [From the introduction]: The original edition of Cronwright’s The Reinterment on Buffelskop (1983) was produced by Guy Butler and Nick Visser to commemorate the centenary of the 1883 publication of The Story of an African Farm. The Butler-Visser text was a photographic reproduction of a typed carbon copy of the first part of Cronwright’s extant diaries plus a special diary he had kept covering in detail the events of the actual reinterment. (The originals are now at the National English Literary Museum [NELM].) Butler included a comprehensive and illuminating introduction to these texts, as well as – under separate soft cover – a set of “Provisional Notes” which draw deeply on his own and his family’s accumulated knowledge of Cradock, its environs and inhabitants. In addition, Butler and Visser included two passages excised by Cronwright from the typescript of his Life of Olive Schreiner: a word picture of Charles Heathcote, and the longer account of “The Nienaber Incident” – pages which deal with the execution of three innocent men at De Aar on 19 March 1901, and Cronwright’s subsequent attempts at legal reparation for them and their families. The substantive text of the Butler-Visser edition is often difficult to read because of the method of reproduction; moreover, because it also reproduces Cronwright’s emendations (in ink) of the typescript, it is frankly uninviting. Thus, when the NELM Council proposed a publication commemorating the 150th anniversary of Olive Schreiner’s birth on 24 March 1855, it seemed appropriate that a second attempt be made to give students of Olive Schreiner’s works easier access to Cronwright’s detailed account of this “bizarre, romantic” episode. Furthermore, from the perspective of text history, the typescript of the Reinterment antedates both Cronwright’s Life and The Letters of Olive Schreiner. Parts of it are clearly Cronwright’s preliminary ‘notes towards’ his Life, and, as Butler hypothesizes, the whole of the Reinterment might have been intended as a separate (and earlier) publication. Finally, the sarcophagus on Buffelskop is one of South Africa’s more noteworthy literary shrines: while the idea of re-editing an account of Olive Schreiner’s reinterment might be thought to be a futile exercise in intellectual recycling, our intention is that both husband and wife should live again through a rediscovery of the thoughts and feelings that led them to this dramatic final resting-place.
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- Date Issued: 2006