Reading Olive's Letters

When historians are in the archives, it is as close as they will physically come to the people they are studying. When reading letters on thin yellowed sheets of paper, I take special note to small details. A slight stain makes you curious - was there a coffee drip? Smudged writing suggests that perhaps the letter writer was in a hurry. My favorite small details are fingerprints generally caused by the smudged ink of a fountain pen. When you can see the fingerprint of a person that lived a hundred years before, you feel closer to them...it's a detail so intimate that you wouldn't have noticed had you been their best friend.

Reading letters, as I found out today, can also be quite sad. As a historian, you generally know what's next in the "big events" and use the archives to gather your detailed information. Before reading through her letters, I knew that Olive Schreiner gave birth to her only child that died shortly afterwards. The incident was so painful that she never really fully recovered. It's tragic, but the incident is so far removed from my reality that it is difficult to really care. It's not until I am sifting through her letters and looking at her fingerprint on the smudged ink that the details become more important to me. Her series of letters to a close friend is quite painful to read when you are a historian that knows the events that will occur. For 8 months she discusses the baby, and plans for the baby. Her health is perfect and she claims she never felt better. One quote in particular stuck out:

September 15, 1894: "I am very well. It's not the little tiny baby I look forward to as much, but the little child when it grows older, and I can tell it stories and take it for walks with me. Cron is very anxious it should be a little girl, but except for this...I shall be as glad if it is a boy as a girl.”

When you know the big picture to the small details it can be almost painful to read Olive's letters at times.