Towards the epistolarium: issues in researching and publishing the Olive Schreiner letters

Introduction 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.1 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-062-231286), 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. Significance of the project The OSLP is one the largest qualitative projects funded in the UK, and also one of the biggest sociologically-orientated projects to make use of letters on a very large scale since Thomas and Znaniecki's pioneering study The Polish Peasant in Europe and America in 1920. The project is multi-disciplinary, drawing on aspects of social history, literary studies, social geography but within a sociological framework and combining this with the use of software technologies in our analysis. The project has several areas of focus: the research project itself, involving detailed analysis of Schreiner's letters, preparation of 'the complete Olive Schreiner Letters' for electronic publication, as well as knowledge transfer around the user interface for a range of international users, and also via a series of Virtual Research Environment (VRE) workshops. These areas are explored below, after a brief contextualisation of Schreiner and the importance of her letters. Significance of Schreiner's letters Crucially, Schreiner's letters open up and allow for a radical rethinking of the social history of late 19th and early 20th century Britain and South Africa, and do so in a number of ways. First, Schreiner's letters provide insightful and often startlingly prescient social and political commentary and analysis on the events and changes that took place over the period of her epistolarly life (from the early 1870s until 1920). Secondly, her letters are a part of that social history itself; they are not simply a resource to be plundered for 'what they can show about the past', but form a fascinating topic of study in and of themselves. And lastly, Schreiner's letters provide a large and complex dataset for theorising letters and epistolarity. Schreiner's epistolarly life spanned a period of massive social change and momentous events, both in Britain and South Africa. As a young woman Schreiner lived for a time at the Diamond Fields in Kimberley and later on in Johannesburg on the brink of the 1899-1902 South African War, and in both places she was witness to the birth of a very particular type of capitalism in Southern Africa, with all its attendant social and political consequences. Later, in the 1880s Schreiner was an important member of several literary and intellectual networks in London - she was part of the Men and Women's Club, for example - and has been described as the archetypal 'New Woman'. After her return to South Africa she went on to live through the South African War under martial law. She witnessed (and opposed) the Union of South Africa in 1910, and was crucially involved in the women's suffrage movement in South Africa. After returning to Europe for health reasons at the end of 1913, she spent the First World War in London, where she was a key member of the pacifist movement. In sum, Schreiner's letters span the birth of modernity and are both a reflection of and on the processes and events which shaped that era. Schreiner's work engaged long-term with important questions concerning imperialism, capitalism, colonialism and 'race'. …