Jolly 2005

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Letters as / not a genre

Margaretta Jolly & Liz Stanley
Published online: 08 May 2007.
To cite this article: Margaretta Jolly & Liz Stanley (2005): Letters as / not a genre,
Life Writing, 2:2, 91-118
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| Margaretta Jolly and Liz Stanley
Abstract
With the rise of life writing studies, letters have become
the subject of an increasing number of interdisciplinary
Downloaded by [UQ Library] at 12:44 30 April 2013
analyses. The following essay ruminates on what common

characteristics hold such analyses together and the peculiar
difficulties they encounter in theorising a genre that
perhaps, out of all writing practices, most exposes the
limits of genre theory itself. The essay is written,
appropriately, as a dialogue, in which Margaretta's Voice
asks general, if not straightforwardly generic questions
about letters and Liz's Echo answers them in relation to
her current two epistolary projects, theorizing 'the
epistolarium', and editing a new Olive Schreiner collected
letters for publication. The echo here is a voice that,
unlike most echoes, answers back in an argumentative
way. While Margaretta suggests that letters are
proto-genres whose distinctive yet infinitely malleable
features can be best understood through the social and
literary codes of relationship, Liz explains how, after her
scepticism about the concept of genre in her influential
The Auto/Biographical I, she understands what makes
Schreiner's letters distinctive.
truth and sincerity in letters
Margaretta’s Voice:
Many come to letters through an interest in autobiography. Letters present
a similarly tantalising form of writing’s engagement with life, where public
and private, professional and personal are so happily confused. And, let us
LifeWriting | Vol 1, No 2 | 2005 | pp. 1-18

LifeWriting | Vol 1, No 2
admit it, part of the attraction of the genre is that it seems to have escaped
the hot-housing of autobiographical writing of the last thirty years. Too
elusive, too messy, too ordinary, too diverse – whatever it is, letters have
neither had as serious an academic treatment, nor as strong a hold on the
popular imagination. For this reason, letters can open up a whole new archive
for life writing enthusiasts and with that archive, the questions we now
associate with the territory: representativity; the relation of individuals to
social context; the assessment of individual agency; whether and how
narrative is essential to identity; the relationship between individual and

collective time and memory and, perhaps most prominently, the peculiar
reflexivity and relativity of research in the field.
But the delicious arguments that have been had over truth and sincerity
as the usual jumping off point for analysing autobiography do not apply to
letters in any simple way. In explaining why this is so, we begin to appreciate
as well, the reason that letters are equally challenging to much genre theory.
In autobiographies, diaries and journals, tensions between art and artlessness
are rooted in the ambiguous status of a writing that is both creative and
historical, that lies between disciplines of fact and those of fiction. By
contrast, in the letter those tensions represent not so much the ambiguity
between history or fiction as that between the utilitarian and the aesthetic
aspects of writing more generally. Philippe Lejeune has theorised
autobiography to be founded on a ‘pact’ between the writer and reader, as
a promise of truth, even if the truth may be interior or subjective in nature.
But the letter-writer promises only that they will communicate with their
reader. This means that the letter’s truth status is even more ambiguous
than that of the auto/biographer or diarist. As Charles Porter states: ‘A
reader ordinarily presupposes the sincerity of a diary (at least a “real” - as
opposed to a fictional - diary), whereas the reader is always obliged to seek
to measure the sincerity of the letter’ (Porter, 4). On this level, the textual
contract between reader and writer functions on terms more similar to those
of fiction than history, not only because the truth is often less at issue than
entertainment, but more simply, because the truth, with the reader, is
defined as particular rather than general. Thus, while the familiar letter may
be valued for its personality, authenticity or intimacy, the meaning of those
effects is specific not just to time and place but addressee. We might say
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that the literal correspondence between the writer and reader provides the
letter’s epistemological foundation, unsettling the linguistic correspondence
between writing and world, signifier and signifier, of more public genres .
Put simply, the ‘truth’ of the writing is in the relationship rather than in its
subject. Many epistolary critics have accordingly developed safer terminology
than truth, for example, epistolary ‘performance’ or ‘personae’ (Cockin).
To see letter-writing as involving performance does not detract from its
interest as life writing that can take us close to individual experience and
historical determination. It is rather to acknowledge the rhetorical dimension

of even familiar letters, as indeed classical theorists like Cicero, Demetrius
and Quintilian took for granted in classifying the epistolary and the oratorical
as branches of the same art (Farrell, 16). On one level this is common sense:
you adopt a polite tone when writing to the bank manager, a respectful one
to your granny, a self-righteous vengefulness to your ex-lover. Less obvious
is the persona you discover when maintaining a long-term correspondence
without meeting in person, although lately people’s experiences with e-mail
relationships have widely publicised this aspect of letter-writing. It is not
necessary to say that letters are deliberate lies, although we might want to
be suspicious of the assumption that they are the spontaneous outpourings
of the true self. Rather, we need to see a subtle interchange between fantasy,
writing and relationship. It is this that accounts for the extreme flexibility
and variety of letters as forms, and why their theorising requires going
beyond many understandings of genre which focus necessarily on stabler
and more abstract textual contracts. At the same time, clearly, very
conventional epistolary formats do exist. In the next section, I will suggest
ways to understand this paradox, more directly addressing the idea that
letters are thus both a genre and not one. But let me hear your thoughts as
a sociologist, for whom, perhaps, genre is less an aesthetic than a social
category in any case.
Liz’s First Echo:

Indeed, I suppose I approach thinking about letters ‘as/not a genre’ from a
different angle and am wondering whether this is a disciplinary one or
something else. Many theorisations of letters as/not a genre are less
concerned with ‘letters’ en masse than they are with literary letters, letters
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written by literary figures. Notions of truth and sincerity enter into

consideration not least because such letters have evident artful and literary
qualities, immediately raising the question of the relationship between ‘life’
and ‘art’ referentially inscribed or implied by them. But it is important not
to use literary letters, or letters produced by any other specific group of
people, or indeed any other specific type of letters, as the prototype for
thinking about letters as/not a genre, but instead to think beyond such
specifics to the much wider, more varied and complex range of written
exchanges that cluster under the broad heading of ‘letters’. This is not to
reject the concept of genre altogether, but instead to place it under scrutiny,
for there are permanently leaky borders between letters and other genres
of writing, as many commentators have pointed out.
I take it that, in arguing this, my comments draw on and support recent
re-theorisations of genre as transitional, hybridic and in practice ‘messy’
(including from Bawarshi, 2000; Bazerman 1994, 1997; Devitt, 2000; Devitt
et al, 2003; Miller, 1984, 1994; Freedman and Medway 1994 and others),
and so are made in support of your own position, Margaretta. However, I
do want to push the argument a little further, to suggest that notions of
genre are best seen as interesting ideologically-founded categorisations, and
that what ought to be the focus of attention are specific instances and usages
– specific examples of autobiography, diaries, letters and so on. Broadly,
my position with regard to the epistolary is that ‘the letter’ as a genre type
immediately dissolves into messy or hybridic forms once actual examples
come under analytic scrutiny (are Olive Schreiner’s letters to John X.
Merriman, for example, letters to him or rehearsals of her analytical ideas
for a wider audience?). Of course I concede that ‘letters’ in a general way
share some characteristics; but those that most interest me are not those
usually focused on in discussions of the epistolary genre. There are four such
broad characteristics of ‘letters en masse’ I want to indicate, the relevance
of which recurs in my editorial work on the Schreiner letters (see also
Stanley, 2004).
Firstly, unlike the convention of ‘voice and echo’ we are using to explore
such matters herein, letters in correspondences involve exchanges with
reciprocity built in. The writer and reader roles change between one
exchange and other; they are relational and ‘conversation-like’ (although
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without some characteristics of speech-exchanges); and even letters which

are not part of long-term correspondences rarely presume such a stark
hierarchy as ‘voice and echo’ implies. Secondly, as well as their relational
characteristics, both individual ‘one-off’ kinds of letters (‘Dear Gas Board,
Here is the cheque. Yours faithfully.’) and longer-term correspondences
have purposeful intent: there is a purpose in hand (literally so) in writing them,
whether this is to query a gas bill or to maintain a relationship between
people parted by (social or geographical) distance. Thirdly, there are always
referential aspects to letter-writing; letters cannot be reduced to artful

performances without profoundly misunderstanding form (and indeed
performance itself), and they always imply some kind of however indirect
‘real-world’ connection to make their impact for the reader. And fourthly,
all kinds of letters inhabit an interesting ontological as well as epistemological
‘space’, situated as they are on the boundaries of the personal and impersonal.
They originate from a ‘writing I’ (usually singular) and are sent to a ‘reading
I’ (usually but not invariably singular); but they are also very much a public
form with strong structural conventions – address, salutation, ‘business’,
farewell, signature - which help shape (and in some cases determine) content
as well as form and are also often written and read in circumstances that are
social rather than individual.
These four characteristics of epistolarity take interesting shape across
Olive Schreiner’s approximately 5,000 extant letters, for her engagement
with them varies: over time to one correspondent, between different
correspondents, between longer-term correspondents and recipients of
one-off letters, according to mood and fancy, around the specifics of the
relationship between Schreiner and those she wrote letters to, and regarding
the time she had available for writing.1 Within these usually subtle variations
and developments, there are some interesting constants, constants which
suggest that Schreiner’s letters are best understood as ‘in reverse’ of
theorisations of ‘literary letters’ in a crucial regard, which is the conventional
view that epistolary ‘truth’ is contingent on close relationship and the
public/private divide.
The year 1889 acted as a sea-change in the Schreiner epistolarium (a term
I have developed to recognise the epistemological dimensions of collections
of letters and which I want to return to later in our dialogue), as well as in
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her lived life. In 1889 Schreiner returned to South Africa from living in
Europe, rejecting the emphasis on ‘inner life’ which she saw as
over-engrossing her European socialist and feminist friends and which she
herself had been drawn into, and commenting to one such friend, Havelock
Ellis, that “…I turn with such a keen kind of relish to the external world…
I have the same kind of feelings to objective things that a person has to solid
food who has been ill for months and begins to eat again; it is something
quite different from ordinary hunger. My nature craves it…” (25 April 1890,
qtd in Draznin, 459-60). Thereafter there is a distinct difference between

her letters, and the ‘public’ writing she produced (novels, allegories, short
stories, essays, political polemics, theoretical treatises, and open letters
published in newspapers and elsewhere).
However, this difference is absolutely not the expected one, that her
letters to familiars deal with ‘personal’ matters within a ‘private’ circle,
while her published writings are more impersonal. It is in fact the reverse of
this, that her published/public writings contain many statements of her
personal experience relevant to the development of her theoretical ideas.
For example, An English South African’s View… (1899) is a first person and
personalised polemic, Woman and Labour (1911) conducts much of its analysis
in an insightful personal ‘voice’, and her published ‘open letters’ on
conscientious objection between 1914 and 1918 argue her and other people’s
pacifist convictions can only be explained by reference to ‘personal’
experiences and feelings. But in considerable contrast to this, Schreiner’s
post-1889 letters are less personal in content and deal instead with ‘the
external world’ of political events within the broad ethical frame of feminism
and socialism.
This does not mean the elision of ‘the writing I’ in Schreiner’s letters,
but rather the recasting of ‘I’ in the shared epistolary ethics that emerged
between her main correspondents, recasting it into an ‘eventful I’ (Stanley,
2002b). This is an ‘I’ fully engaged with what was referred to earlier as the
‘purposes in hand’ and in which the more usual ‘personal’ matters of private
letters are consigned to silence or to impersonal forms. They are consigned
to silence, because Schreiner uses the sign of silence (in written comments
such as ‘great is silence’); and consigned to impersonal forms, because
whenever strong feeling is involved, even concerning highly ‘public matters’,
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Schreiner writes using the impersonal ‘one’. The referential truth-claims of

her letters are in an interesting way not particularly significant, because they
are largely concerned with matters of interpretation, analysis and
understanding which are shared with other ‘like minds’ within a number of
over-lapping epistolary, friendship and political circles. These are not ‘general
truths’ being advanced for a wide audience, but shared understandings
debated in a within-group context. Here too, Schreiner’s letters resist any
easy pigeon-holing in relation to notions of public and private.
genre
So, Liz, we agree that the meaning of letters, their ‘coherence’ or truth is
relative to the relationship that they in part embody. We are constantly
re-measuring the border between ‘text’ and ‘context’, and your example
of Schreiner’s letters as deeply committed to the public world shows just
how far we must not over-emphasise the separation of the two. Logically
this means we have to have an extremely flexible definition of the genre. In
fact letters are a useful test on the conventions of genre theory itself, as they
continually force text back towards context. But are we prepared to jettison
the idea of genre altogether? This journal issue for one, might not have much
excuse! Charles Bazerman is one critic who I have found suggestive on the
conundrum in his essay ‘Letters and the Social Grounding of Differentiated
Genres’. Bazerman speculates that letter writing, as a very early form of
writing in many cultures, is a kind of parent genre. As the form in which
writing’s historical substitution for oral exchange is most evident, it has both
the flexibility of our primary means of communication and the specificity
of the myriad relationships that encompass it. Thus although distinctive
modes of letter writing soon evolved (the political decree, the Ciceronian
personal missive, the religious Medieval ars dictaminis), letters continue to
symbolise a guarantee of authenticity associated with embodied meeting and
social relationship. In the early Christian church, letters – such as bishops’
introductions or the New Testament books themselves – are framed in forms
of fellowship that reaffirm bonds of community and faith across an expanding
bureaucracy. Similarly, the trappings of letters provided the medium of
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transition in the development of commercial and legal networks from the

Renaissance on in everything from patents to petitions. Even in our now
abstract and symbolic system of exchange value, a residual epistolary form
is visible in the signature and printed ‘promises’ of paper currency. In
journalism, the eyewitness is designated a ‘correspondent’ while in the
academic essay, the letter form pretends to the polite voice of intimate
exchange rather than the belligerent competitor of public scholarship. We
can certainly argue with Derrida that letter writing’s literalisation of the
slippage between writer and reader is itself the proof that no language can
guarantee authenticity or presence. However, the power of Bazerman’s
argument is that it shows even as letter writing ‘facilitates’ abstractions and
virtualities, it always returns writing to its relational origin. Indeed, from
his point of view, it demonstrates most succinctly ‘the sociality that is part
of all writing’ (Bazerman, 27).
Bazerman helps us to explain why letters are both a genre and not a genre,
because they are precisely a transitionary form. From this vantage point, we
can choose to go in the social historical direction, useful if we wish to get
away from idealist views of writing as, Liz, you encourage us to do. But we
can also choose to go in the literary one, where we can find terms to
acknowledge that writing does involve specialisation and form. Most helpful,
of course, are perspectives like Carolyn Miller’s that can situate such formal
specialisation as responses to social and technical situations, changing with
them over time as well as promoting and constructing them, and even dying
out when that situation no longer exists. (The telegram or visiting card might
be examples of the latter).2 This kind of approach will not be news to New
Literacy or Bakhtinian theorists, though it may still be to literary critics so
often caught in a false dichotomy of biographical versus textual interpretation.
I myself have enjoyed the torture of that dichotomy for many years, and I
much appreciate release from it! Another thing I find useful about social
anthropologists like Bazerman is that they open up the field to non-literary
letter writers, who after all are the vast majority. They provide terms to
value a communicative, functionalist view of writing – and confirm my
long-cherished belief that there is no simple opposition between
communication and expression, information and creativity. Janet Maybin’s
study of correspondences with prisoners on death row, for example, shows
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that letter-writing allows prisoners to create life-sustaining virtual families

but also to develop a sense of inner self and self-esteem. Equally, their
penfriends find altruistic intentions blown away in engrossing relationships
that help them through traumas of their own (Maybin). Another telling
example of a social literacy approach that brings together function and
expression is Niko Besnier’s analysis of the profuse correspondences of
Nukulaelae migrants from the Funaafuti Islands. Besnier views these letters’
effusive news, advice, greeting, transaction, as cathartic because they are
such concentrated communicative events, dependent upon limited delivery

service, physical parting and longing, and the taboos that surround the
expression of emotion in more quotidian exchange (Besnier). Liz, you
yourself have a double-approach to genre as both ‘reciprocal’ and
‘purposeful’, ‘referential’, yet ‘structural’.
Liz’s Second Echo:

Well, I hope I have a hybridic and messy one! I certainly agree that letters
are ‘plastic’ and probably foundational of other writing genres, and have
found the epistolary basis of many of the excavated first century AD Roman
writings from Vindolanda in the north-east of England fascinating in this
regard (Birley, 1999). Here the first known letter written for and signed by
a woman (a party invitation) exists cheek by jowl with epistolary greetings,
‘business’ and signatures on grave markers, in inventories sent by one clerk
to another, in orders sent to Rome for shoes and clothes and in invocations
to the gods. At the same time, I find a preoccupation with genre/not genre
rather than simply taking off from this into interrogating specific writings,
concerning letters but also other forms of life-writing, a remnant of an earlier
analytical stance and at odds with the kinds of ideas that most interest me,
ideas now most usually associated with post-structuralist and
deconstructionist thinking. The Auto/Biographical I (Stanley, 1992) was
written in part to take issue with the ‘chopping-block’ approach to life
writings, which treated diaries as generically different from autobiography
from memoirs from letters from… Its more important purpose was to
transcend the rigidities and analytical limitations imposed by then-usual
definitions of genre by developing the idea of ‘auto/biography’ as an
analytical tool for engaging with complexities at work across the different
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forms of life-writings. Thinking ‘auto/biography’ does not deny there are

differences between different forms of life writing, but it does emphasise
that these differences are not generic because specific examples slide
hybridically and messily into, or contain various elements of, their ‘others’.
Working on Olive Schreiner’s letters for the last eight or so years has
added to my thinking about questions regarding genre (Stanley 2002b,
2002c, 2002d, 2004). For me, while as a general genre category ‘the letter’
is so leaky as to be of little sustained analytical use (thus my reference to it
just now as a stepping off point), as a specific one applied to a particular

epistolarium – eg. the Olive Schreiner letters, as distinct from the Emily
Dickinson letters, or the Virginia Woolf letters, or… - it has considerably
more analytic utility. That is, people like Schreiner, who produced a variety
of ‘public’ and ‘private’ writings, seem to me to inscribe their own structural
divisions between different kinds or forms of writing. This is what I think
of as ‘genres-for-them’, something which makes their letters, memoir, diary,
essays, theory, novels, distinctive and different from the same ‘forms’ or
‘genre-examples’ written by others. Consequently it is worth exploring
letters as/not a genre with regard to the particular practices of letter-writers,
one aspect of which I have already indicated with regard to Olive Schreiner:
her letters trouble epistolary genre distinctions by inhabiting ‘the eventful’
rather than ‘the personal’, by excising the usual notion of ‘the writing I’ in
life-writings, and by inscribing such things only under the sign of silence
(‘great is silence’) and distancing (using ‘one’ rather than ‘I’). In addition,
there are more significant dimensions of Schreiner’s letters for thinking
about ‘letters-as-a-genre-for-Olive-Schreiner’, which hinge on the idea of
the epistolarium (Stanley, 2004). The epistolarium has overlapping
dimensions, each with rather different epistemological reverberations: as
an epistolary record in their own right; as the total surviving letters with a
complex and perhaps unknowable relationship to the total actually written;
and as the ‘ur-letters’ produced by transcribing, editing and publishing
activities.
Firstly, the Schreiner epistolarium has its own ‘shape’, sets of
correspondents, temporal dimensions, elisions and silences, gaps and
destructions and interpretational framing in a ‘Schreiner canon’ of received
knowledge and points of view (Stanley, 2001); it is quite unlike, say, the
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Mark Twain (Clements, 1988) or Kathleen Ferrier (2003) or Virginia Woolf

(1975-80) or Mohatma Gandhi (1968) epistolariums, each of which having
their own distinctiveness of ‘shape’.
Secondly, across the ‘shape’ of the Schreiner epistolarium, Schreiner
articulates a distinctive but largely consistent ‘voice’. Some aspects of this
have already been touched on: Schreiner’s radical inversions of public and
private writing forms, the elision of ‘the writing I’ in favour of ‘the eventful
I’, the ‘double take’ invoking of silence and uses of the impersonal. But
alongside, indeed intertwined with these, her usage is specific and mutates
these into variant forms. This is because Schreiner writes in very different
ways to her different correspondents, tailoring her letters to the interests
of her various correspondents, and more importantly to the relationship
between them and her, so that these structural ‘constants’ actually shape up
differently and have different contextual meanings, as well as having a
temporal dimension and changing over time.
And thirdly, in the last resort there is always a referential basis, of
particular lives lived in specific social contexts and historical circumstances,
to the epistolary. Succinctly, ‘all the world’ is absolutely not a text; letters
having meaning because they are ‘from’ and ‘of’ the writer as a living person
engaging dialogically with others; and this is forgotten or bracketed only at
analytical and ethical peril. It was in this connection that the 1889
‘sea-change’ in Schreiner’s epistolary practices occurred and with such
mammoth consequentiality for the Schreiner epistolarium – this occurred
because she changed the way she lived her life. Consequently if such
referential complexities are not fully attended to, then the reader will simply
miss the point of Schreiner’s letters in a very basic way. I’m very aware,
however, that the way I think about letters is probably rather different from
yours, although I suspect this can’t be reduced to the differences between
historical sociology and literary criticism.
art and relationship
In fact, our interest in letters as a form fully engaged with and by
relationships, and in that sense, political history, has much in common, as
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has our sense that letters are limit cases for genre theory. But I agree that,
as a literary critic, I still wonder about how to account for the aesthetic
potential of letter writing. Here we have an investment in the terminology
of genre that is not so easily disposed of. Literary readers have long sought
to find terms for those who are exceptional letter writers, who write more,
write better, who prefer letters to other genres. The plaudits on the recent
release of Elizabeth Bishop’s letters are a case in point – surely we have to
admit that Bishop’s letters involve some of the creative attributes of her
poetry (Bishop, Paulin, Prosser). Although after the 17th century, epistolary
fashions rejected older rhetorical styles for ideals of spontaneity and
sentiment, critics have been remarkably consistent across the centuries in
seeing a letter as coded through a five-point structure of address, greeting,
business (even if the business is ‘elegant civility’), farewell, signature
(Riberio). And other theorists like Bruce Redford clearly distinguish ‘good’
letter writing through classical aesthetic criteria of unity, autonomy,
discipline, volume, in which it is the ability of the letter to transcend its
writer’s context that guarantees its artistic value:
At its most successful, ... epistolary discourse ... fashions a distinctive world
at once internally consistent, vital, and self-supporting. The letters of a master
thereby escape from their origins as reservoirs of fact: coherence replaces
correspondence as the primary standard of judgement. (Redford, 9)
Virginia Woolf was another who believed letters could be an art form, but
she suggests a more relational definition, describing them delightfully as ‘the
humane art which owes its origin to the love of friends’. This links the art
of writing to the art of relationship itself – an approach less wedded to
celebrating genius in isolation. Praising Horace Walpole’s letters for their
malleability, she argued that ‘All good letter writers feel the drag of the face
on the other side of the page and obey it - they take as much as they give’
(Woolf, 726) There are some risks in this position however – if used
reductively it can downgrade the art involved in both relationships and
writing – an issue of particular sensitivity to feminist critics who have been
keen to validate both private forms of writing and relational modes of being
(Farrell).
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Literary critics have found it hard to reconcile art and relationship as

terms for interpretation. The classic example is the argument over how to
read the French 17th century letter writer, Madame de Sévigné. The basic
literary puzzle has been to determine whether she wrote so prolifically to
her daughter because she loved her or whether her professed extreme love
became an excuse to write. The mid-century editor of her letters Roger
Dûchene has her as a wonderful mother, that is, brilliant in passion rather
than art. Bernard Bray challenged Dûchene in the 1960s from a structuralist
position, saying that Sévigné wasn’t writing in any simple sense from the
heart but manipulating an elaborate ‘système épistolaire’. This system
comprised the material conditions of the postal system, the social functions
of letter-writing in transferring information from the court to the provinces
and the aristocracy’s interest in the analysis of the passions. What appears
to us now as highly individual and spontaneous is in fact conventional and
formal. Bray is, in effect, challenging Duchene’s conventional opposition
between professional and unprofessional writer, saying that all language is
public and coded.
I prefer a compromise position that allows the reconciliation of a textual
and a biographical approach, in part because this leaves some room for the
individual. Louise Horowitz’s reading of Sévigné does this very well.
Horowitz sees Sévigné as initially writing out of love, but in that process
discovering an autonomous creative pleasure in writing. In other words,
Horowitz does not lose the affective dimension of the communicative form,
as in Bray’s materialist-formalist analysis but sees affection transmuted by
the psychology of writing itself:
It is not... that the initial erotic sentiments are so readily abandoned... but
rather that the narcissism at the root of the sentiment forms also the basis for
the exploitation of the emotion through writing. (Horowitz, 25)
Horowitz says that this double movement ‘may be the most genuine mark
of letter writing’. This implies that great letters come from a particular, and
narcissistic, kind of personality, which not only loves to write, but prefers
to love through writing. Such a view not only hints at a pattern of plot
whereby the address to the other becomes an address to the self, but suggests
that what is so distinctive about the familiar letter as a genre, at least since
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Sévigné, ultimately has a psychological basis. This certainly relates to my

earlier point regarding ‘truth’ or ‘sincerity’ in letters as relative to a
relationship mediated by both fantasy and writing. Liz, could you say
something about Olive Schreiner’s epistolary art, and whether you think
these psychological explanations for it are useful?
Liz’s Third Echo:

I’ll return to matters of psychology, but first want to comment on this idea
of epistolary art or stylistics, which I find extremely interesting. Olive

Schreiner’s letters, even the most fascinating (and there are hundreds of
these) are not ‘great letters’, so-called. Virginia Woolf, who wrote many
such, commented on the first heavily bowdlerised edition of Schreiner letters
(Cronwright-Schreiner 1924) that “Olive Schreiner was neither a born
letter-writer nor did she choose to make herself become one. She wrote
carelessly, egotistically…. As if she were talking in the privacy of her room
to a friend whom she trusted” (Woolf 1979, 180). And while this effect was
to a large extent manufactured by the extremely heavy-handed editorial
practices of Schreiner’s estranged husband, it still says something important
about Schreiner’s letters in their ‘natural state’ in manuscript form. That
is, these are letters organised around ‘purposes in hand’ and the dialogics
of friendship, in the ways already indicated. They are certainly also artful,
for the kind of epistolary practices discussed earlier to add up to an aesthetics
or perhaps stylistics of letter-writing. At the same time, Schreiner is no
stylist in the manner of Madame de Sévigné or Virginia Woolf, for her
concerns are largely extra-textual ones: with the relationship with her
correspondents, and with analysing the world around her with a view to
helping to change it in concert with other like-minds, as well as with
temporally-emergent epistolary dialogics and ethics.
There are contrasting uses of ‘the same’ stylistic invoking of ‘silence’, as
shown by extracts from three of Schreiner’s letters to her close friend, the
Quaker educationalist Betty Molteno:
“…I have been going through a very strange chapter of my life since I came to
Johannesburg, & I think because the life has been so terrible & intense, & yet
the circumstances were such that I could not write of them to any humanbeing,
[sic] is what has cut me off from attempting to write to any of my friends at
104
all. When one is ?giving, & especially as long as one is unmarried, one seems
to come closer to ones friends, because one can open ones heart to them & the
one or two nearest & dearest can share all your life with you. Afterwards life
becomes so complex, that the whole personal life must be lived quite alone in
silence. To perfect strangers you can write & speak more easily; but to those
you really love it is hardly worth expressing yourself unless it can be from the
depths of your life; & so you don’t express yourself at all…. (? May 1899, OS
to Betty Molteno, University of Cape Town Manuscripts & Archives)
“…I never write to any one about politics or public matters now. That silence
which I spoke of in my pamphlet of 1899 has come! ^Do you remember the
passage?^ There is silence – There is a time to be silent & there is a time to
speak…” (23 February 1903, OS to Betty Molteno, University of Cape Town
Manuscripts & Archives)
“…If I should see Margaret or Mrs Murray before you return (which is not
likely) I will of course not hint at anything about Lenox . ^Nor^ anything you have
told me[.]
“Great is silence”[.] One may injure a fellow human more by talking about
them & their affairs than by stoning them[.]” (22 July 1920, OS to Betty
Molteno, University of Cape Town Manuscripts & Archives)
While the first of these extracts might be forced into a ‘psychology’

interpretation because involving Schreiner’s principle of not writing about
‘the whole personal life’, and also strongly hinting at a ‘very strange chapter’
in her personal life which Molteno would recognise implying the dynamics
of Schreiner’s marriage, the second and third extracts are very different.
The second is from a letter concerned with the political changes occurring
in South Africa and its ‘never writing’ and ‘time to be silent’ concerns the
increasing political power of the Afrikaner majority and its racial politics.
The third extract comes from a letter in which her elliptical comments
invoke on-going conversation, as well as on-going exchanges of letters, about
Betty Molteno’s plans in the wake of the then-recent death of her partner
Alice Greene and whether Molteno might return to South Africa; the ‘not
hinting’ and ‘silence’ here concerns gossip in a social and family network
and the emotional damage it might do. These variant uses of ‘the same’
stylistics raise the interplay between aesthetics and a historical/sociological
105
perspective on letters as a social practice. The referential basis of letters,

howsoever complexly and indirectly thought about, always has to be taken
into consideration in unpacking letters within the Schreiner epistolarium.
editing and contextualisation
I agree that one of the problems with the psychological approach to letter
writing is that it cannot explain why letter-writing gets taken up in particular

social contexts or historical periods, why some cultures encourage letter
writing and others don’t. When Susan Abbott came out to her mother in a
letter, after ten years of concealing her lesbianism, she was clearly fulfilling
a very personal need and also using writing to do what had proved impossible
in person (Abbott). But she also wrote because of more general social
fashions: a middle class, young woman in 1980s North America very often
writes to her mother, for mothers are still expected to maintain domestic
ties through letters, as well as phone. Many of us will recognise the
push-and-pull of e-mail as an overbearing expectation in the culture of
academic relationship – in which psychological analyses of our need to be
wanted, or even our enjoyment of writing, clearly must be complemented
by the bigger picture of the technological and social growth of information
networks, the rise of a consumer model of education, the globalisation of
university life and more.
One of the most powerful ways I know to historicise letter writing is to
look at its editing. Here, Liz, your concept of the ‘epistolarium’, or total
archive, of a writer’s correspondences, is very useful. I have also been
inspired by Janet Altman’s history of what she calls ‘the letter book as a
literary institution’ in 16th, 17th and 18th century France. Since her
pioneering formalist study Epistolary: Approaches to a Form, Altman has turned
much more historicist. Here she looks at the relationship between (literary)
letters, publication and printing technology, and presses the authors of
published correspondences:
to give us a sense of what literary values were at stake for the author and the
reading public in the publication of a real correspondence... tracing ... the way
in which published correspondences, whenever they address their paradoxical
106
function of preserving the ephemeral, institutionalize themselves as literature or

as literary documents and in so doing project or reinforce certain images of
the “Republic of Letters” at given moments in history. (Altman, 18)
Altman’s approach reminds us that much of the ‘art’ of letter writing is in

fact the ‘art of editing’, and that much of the ‘autobiography’ we are seeking
comes from a narrative constructed after the fact. But her institutional focus
also opens the letter up to the historical context that defines its preservation.
For example, her history of letter publication in France tracks the emergence
of humanist values of individuality and, in particular, femininity, as well as

the transition from hand written to printed texts.
The history of letter editing is not necessarily representative of book
publication though, as so much of it is distinctively amateur. Most letter
books are edited by family or friends. War letters, for example, are often
edited as commemorations – and indeed in the 19th century, it was common
to collect letters as part of memorial books (Jolly, 2005). Letter-books,
then, are auto/biographical genres, and involve transitions from private to
public in the way that many letters do. It fascinates me that researching an
epistolary relationship involves another relationship, that of editor to writer,
or even editor to letter-keeper, often provoking intense transferences and
echoes of the original correspondence. More ironically still, is that editing
letters can be more straightforwardly autobiographical than their original
writing. Before we get on to some of the ethical questions this raises, I’d
like to ask Liz more about the enigma of Schreiner’s ‘silences’ in her letters.
What is the silence, what is the story you as auto/biographical editor are
going to tell?
Liz’s Fourth Echo:

In responding in a somewhat roundabout way to both silence and the stories
that editors tell, I want to return to the epistolarium and the ‘ur-letters’
resulting from editorial practices, for it is through such ‘ur-letters’ that
reading ‘the letters of….’ Woolf or Ferrier, Twain or Gandhi, occurs for
the vast majority of readers, and not the manuscript incarnations. This is at
the heart of ‘the story’ that I as an editor of letters tell, and there are aspects
107
of it that are immensely challenging at an epistemological, and also an ethical,

level.
An epistolarium acts as a radical force in bringing together, indeed more
strongly in creating, what never was: ‘by nature’, letters are written one at
a time, over sometimes lengthy time-periods, and in dialogue with replies,
whether on paper or in person; and neither the letter-writer, nor their
readers/correspondents as a group, ever see the whole or even that part of
it which remains extant and archived. The epistolarium, then, is an unnatural
epistolary creation, as are those dependent sub-creations from it known as

‘collections’ or ‘edited’ letters, creations which depart radically,
fundamentally, from the ontological and epistemological qualities of ‘actual
letters’. Selection, transcription and explication in editing letters from an
epistolarium for publication have consequential reverberations for
contextualisation.
It is only very infrequently that an entire epistolarium can be published.
For one thing, the survival of everything that was written is extremely rare.
For another, it is only very exceptionally that publishers will contemplate
publishing all of what survives, unless the letter-writer concerned is so
famous and deemed so significant that such an investment is thought likely
to pay off in financial terms. Collected published letters are consequently
selections in of some letters and the selection out of others. In this respect,
a very different impression of ‘Olive Schreiner’ is provided by comparing,
for example, the bowdlerised collection by Cronwright-Schreiner (1924),
the selective and non-transparently edited letters by Richard Rive (1987),
and the exemplary full transcriptions by Claire Yaffa Draznin (1992) of the
correspondence between Schreiner and one of her correspondents, Havelock
Ellis. This is to contemplate the selection process in one direction, from the
whole to a published part; but of course readers make the reverse move, in
generalising about the whole from the parts made available to them and
(usually) taken on trust as in some sense representative. The result can be
sometimes radical differences in how the letter-writer is represented and
understood, in Schreiner’s case with all three collections, albeit for very
different reasons (Draznin only because of the particular correspondence
focused on), presenting her concerns and practical involvements in a very
depoliticised way.
108
Alongside making selections, editors of letters also have to make decisions

with practical consequences about exactly how to transcribe manuscript
letters. This may sound like a simple matter of transferring handwriting or
typescript into a printed version, but is much more complex than this. For
instance, Schreiner’s letters may ‘end’ on a last sheet of paper, but then
continue in a PS at the top and around the sides of the first sheet; there may
be notes on the envelope; and radical differences in handwriting indicate
different writing contexts and also different moods, to mention only a few
of the instances where the print medium is defective in being able to

represent aspects of manuscripts which are actually important to evaluating
meaning and significance.
And also ‘contextualisation’ in a very direct sense has become part of the
editorial function, through what has become the ‘usual’ explication of
‘obscure’ references and provision of ‘missing’ information. Manuscript
letters are not met with ‘in the raw’ in archive collections complete with
additional instructions from a third party about the allusions they contain,
who people mentioned in passing are and their significance for the writer,
information about previous and future events in the letter-writer’s life and
so on. Those who work on manuscript letters work on them minus all of
this and have to puzzle out such things piecemeal. These are, however, all
things which have come to be seen as appropriately provided by editors, the
particular ‘third parties’ involved, who are now more or less obliged or
even required to act as brokers between letters and the readers of their
published ur-versions, by assembling ‘complete’ knowledge from
‘incomplete’ sources. Such contextualisation may start as providing individual
small pieces of individual information, but in total add up to a major
interpretation of relevancies and provide a strong context of ‘fact’ against
which published letters are then read by readers.
editing as kaleidoscope? ethics and epistolary research
You delight me with this proposal that ‘genre’, as far as we want to keep it,
is the work of the letter-editor or reader … but demonstrate your point all
too tantalisingly in withholding the end of the story about Schreiner’s silences
109
. I am sure we will agree, however, that we cannot finish any discussion

about the specialness of letters without addressing their ethical challenge.
Here again, letters do everything that autobiography does but in double
dose. Much has been written on how autobiography cannot be separated
from biography, and in that respect, the decision to reveal personal aspects
of one’s life invariably raises responsibilities towards revealing those of
others. But a correspondence is literally dual-authored, and many more
ethical and legal issues arise from this. Epistolary research abounds with
charges of voyeurism, theft, misinterpretation and misrepresentation, partly

deriving from the practical question of dealing with the split between
ownership and copyright in a correspondence. Working on recent letters,
such as my own research on letters from the women’s movement since the
1970s, focuses these issues dramatically. I have found it hard to get access
to letters for good reason. One woman wanted me to have the love letters
of an illicit relationship she had with her Phd supervisor over several years.
I asked her whether her supervisor was happy with this – and I never heard
from her again. Another example was a three-way letter relationship at a
women’s peace camp – two of the parties have consented but not the third.
But I persist in believing that letters give a distinctive way into the history
and literature of the women’s movement as campaign tools, as creative
networking, as the means to trace relationships in a movement that prided
itself on politicising its personal relationships, as a discourse of sisterhood,
as an aspect of the intensely creative autobiographical art of feminism (Jolly,
2002, Jolly, 2004).
Liz, I was very inspired by your earlier article on editing Hannah
Cullwick’s diary in this light. There, you dealt with the ethics of writing
about a 19th century working class woman’s diary through thinking about
biography as a ‘kaleidoscope’ of frankly stated interests and identifications
between biographer and biographee, rather than the more traditional model
of biography as a supposedly objective but often objectifying microscope,
in which the biographer’s viewing position is concealed (Stanley, 1987).
How has this guided your editing of Schreiner’s letters?
110
Liz’s Final Echo:

I shall return to Schreiner’s silences, fear not. Let me start by way of these
‘kaleidoscopic’ aspects. Collections of letters are definitionally temporal
productions and in this sense resist the hegemonic tendencies of biography
(and autobiography has these too, of course). Editorial selection, transcription
and explication as components of contextualisation all have ethical dimensions
and consequences and shape ‘the story’ as told by editors. However, in my
final response I want to comment on a more basic aspect of editorial ethics:
whether there are things editors should keep quiet about in the name of
ethical propriety because, as it were, looking in the face of their letter-writing
subject. I do not think there can be prescriptions about this (although my
predilection is certainly towards the ‘tell it all’ end of the spectrum) and
that each case should be considered on its merits. The key example facing
me in editing Schreiner’s letters - there were others in editing for publication
Hannah Cullwick’s diaries (Stanley, 1984) – concerns many (but not all) of
her reverberating invocations of ‘silence’.
Across several thousand extant letters, only once have I found Schreiner
definitely breaking such a silence, with a number of additional instances
where circumstantial comments strongly imply what the silenced ‘something’
was likely to have been. This broken silence concerns the conduct and
character of her husband Cron Cronwright-Schreiner in a letter to Betty
Molteno and it enables various circumstantial comments to be linked, because
each involved ‘something else’ that did indeed ‘come soon’, as Schreiner
phrases it in the extract below:
Dear Friend…
I’m so glad it has been such a good time with your brother, & I’m so thankful
you are keeping well, at least better….
_____________________________________________________
As I sat writing a terrible blow has fallen on me. ((this is for you & Miss Greene
only)) Cron came in & told me he had to leave for Cape Town tonight he has
to go tonight. De Villiers the little attorney here is bringing an action against
him for one thousand pounds damages for some thing Cron wrote about him
to the Chief Sherrif in Cape Town. I think he will win the case. What Cron
111
said about him may be true, but he can’t prove it, & we shall have to pay as he
^I had to pay^ the £200 to de Beers in Kimberley. It will take every farthing
we both have in the world & this little house too. Cron is going down to ask
my brother Will’s advice. Once I should have been crushed by this, but nothing
seems to matter to me any more. Nothing matters, nothing matters.
I shall send you & Miss Greene if you care to have them some letters of
introduction…I must go & take the bread out of the oven. Cron only spends
Sunday in Cape Town. He returns at once.
Don’t please say one word to him or any one else about the case. Good bye dear
ones. I love you both so much.
Olive
You see I couldn’t leave him any more than a mother could leave her little
child. He will always be in trouble. If we weather this something else will come
soon.
(?23 July 1904, OS to Betty Molteno, University of Cape Town Manuscripts
& Archives)
(?23 July 1904, OS to Betty Molteno, University of Cape Town Manuscripts

& Archives)
It is certain that Olive Schreiner would be more than furious with breaking
this her chosen silence in public, in published writing. But then, Schreiner
also vehemently rejected the idea there should be a ‘life’ or a ‘letters’ after
her death, determinedly destroyed as many letters to her that she could,
and did her best to retrieve all her letters to other people so these could be
burned too. However, having decided to breach the pact that Schreiner
made with herself and those closest to her (that is, in my producing a ‘new
Schreiner letters’) does not in itself provide a basis for publishing (or not
publishing) her 23 July 1904 letter to Molteno. This needs to be considered
in specific terms, not general ones, as indeed should every other letter as
well. This letter is ‘in’ because, such is its kaleidoscopic effect on
interpretation, that it provides not only a key to understanding many silences
in Schreiner’s letters, but more generally puts a new complexion on
life-decisions made by Schreiner which have been construed by some
112
commentators as indications of ‘inner’ or psychological failings. Schreiner’s

utterly sad ‘You see I couldn’t leave him any more than a mother could leave
her little child’ provides a connection with other such sad comments and
shows them to be located in her views about commitment, relationships,
duty, all important in attempting to understand ‘her’, in obtaining the
measure of the woman in the terms she set for herself.
ps
Bringing a voice together with its echo is perhaps to emerge from a cave, to
end a correspondence, and this would not really do justice to the space of
difference we have tried to open up in this essay. That is, it is difficult to
envisage just what “a conclusion” in the conventional sense of the term would
be like, because we have elaborated two rather different positions with
regard to letters as/not a genre, and readers will by this point have read
these. Margaretta, as a literary critic, has been more preoccupied with the
art of letters, which is why she started with issues of truth. The limits and
biases towards certain classes and types of writers that this can impose has
been perhaps more obvious to Liz as a sociologist. Margaretta, however,
equally recognises that critics have to come to terms with the fact that letters
are social and relational practices above all else. Here, then, we agree that
letters lie on the very borders of what constitutes a genre, for they are
continually dissolving and being reinvented in the sheer variety of social
relationships they reflect, as well as looking back to the pre-history of writing
itself in oral exchange. We have also both moved increasingly towards
insisting that any theorising of letters must take into account the
letter-archivist and editor, who so often shapes any public reader’s experience
of epistolary form, as well as mediating the inevitable ethical issues that
come with reading another’s correspondence. At the same time, we both
emphasise that letter-writers cannot be reduced to social statistics (the white,
working class, British, able-bodied job applicant, for example), anymore
than writing can be understood purely in terms of its function: this would
be a travesty of the individuality that letters can both reflect and nurture.
Liz’s work on Schreiner is a case in point. Inverting the terms of more literary
critics, Liz celebrates Schreiner’s reciprocal, purposeful address towards
the public, political life, defining this as what distinguishes Schreiner’s letters
113
from her novels, memoirs, and other writings. Nevertheless, Schreiner’s

letter-writing emerges as distinctive as her personality: dazzlingly energetic,
politically visionary, politically also sorrowful. We both concede that overly
structural explanations of people, like those of genre, are as limiting as
narrowly aesthetic and psychological ones, and letters, at once the messiest,
most diverse and most literally tied to circumstance, are the best
(proto)genre to remind us of this.
Some kind of final “signing off ” to the reader, just to bring it together, is
useful, not least because of the partially fragmented narrative produced by

the voice/echo structure, which some might think begs for synthesis before
closing. A first short synthetic comment is that we actively cherish the
differences that exist between our different approaches; we do not want,
nor do we think either possible or desirable, to iron out of existence such
differences in a bland compromise overview. The second is that, while both
of us work in multi- or perhaps hybridic- disciplinary ways, we each do so
from a firm disciplinary base and find the provocation of disciplinary
differences good to think with. We have relished our differences even in
this short exchange, bringing out the dialogues and uncertainties usually
hidden in the clarity and polish of academic monologue. Yet in the end,
perhaps, we agree that letters are special in their very lack of specialness,
challenging and rewarding to read, edit as well as write, because they demand
a theory that can be as adaptable as epistolary relationships themselves.
Notes
1 Olive Schreiner (1855-1920) was the foremost feminist writer and theorist of her age. Her key publications range
across a number of genres and are internally marked by heteroglossia, and include: The Story of an African Farm (London:
Chapman and Hall, 1883); Dreams (London: Unwin, 1890); Dream Life And Real Life, A Little African Story (London:
Unwin, 1893); Trooper Peter Halket Of Mashonaland (London: Unwin, 1897); Woman And Labour (London: Unwin,
1911); Thoughts On South Africa (London: Unwin 1923); Stories, Dreams And Allegories (London: Unwin, 1923); From
Man To Man; Or, Perhaps Only.... (London: Unwin, 1926); Undine (London and New York: Benn, 1929); collections
of her letters are referenced later. Liz’s research has involved work in all the major archive collections on all aspects
of Schreiner’s extant papers, manuscripts and letters (Stanley, 2002a), including her work in progress of preparing
a new Schreiner letters for publication.
114
2 We would like to thank the anonymous readers of this article at submission stage for their illuminating suggestions,
particularly in relation to our broader argument about genre, and to the editor Laurie McNeill for her sensitive work
on this issue as a whole.
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On: 30 April 2013, At: 12:44

Letters as / not a genre

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analyses. The following essay ruminates on what common

truth and sincerity in letters

LifeWriting | Vol 1, No 2 | 2005 | pp. 1-18

narrative is essential to identity; the relationship between individual and

historical determination. It is rather to acknowledge the rhetorical dimension

Liz’s First Echo:

written by literary figures. Notions of truth and sincerity enter into

without some characteristics of speech-exchanges); and even letters which

referential aspects to letter-writing; letters cannot be reduced to artful

qtd in Draznin, 459-60). Thereafter there is a distinct difference between

Schreiner writes using the impersonal ‘one’. The referential truth-claims of

transition in the development of commercial and legal networks from the

that letter-writing allows prisoners to create life-sustaining virtual families

such concentrated communicative events, dependent upon limited delivery

Liz’s Second Echo:

forms of life-writings. Thinking ‘auto/biography’ does not deny there are

just now as a stepping off point), as a specific one applied to a particular

Mark Twain (Clements, 1988) or Kathleen Ferrier (2003) or Virginia Woolf

art and relationship

Literary critics have found it hard to reconcile art and relationship as

Sévigné, ultimately has a psychological basis. This certainly relates to my

Liz’s Third Echo:

of epistolary art or stylistics, which I find extremely interesting. Olive

While the first of these extracts might be forced into a ‘psychology’

perspective on letters as a social practice. The referential basis of letters,

editing and contextualisation

writing is that it cannot explain why letter-writing gets taken up in particular

function of preserving the ephemeral, institutionalize themselves as literature or

Altman’s approach reminds us that much of the ‘art’ of letter writing is in

of humanist values of individuality and, in particular, femininity, as well as

Liz’s Fourth Echo:

of it that are immensely challenging at an epistemological, and also an ethical,

epistolary creation, as are those dependent sub-creations from it known as

Alongside making selections, editors of letters also have to make decisions

of the instances where the print medium is defective in being able to

editing as kaleidoscope? ethics and epistolary research

. I am sure we will agree, however, that we cannot finish any discussion

charges of voyeurism, theft, misinterpretation and misrepresentation, partly

Liz’s Final Echo:

(?23 July 1904, OS to Betty Molteno, University of Cape Town Manuscripts

commentators as indications of ‘inner’ or psychological failings. Schreiner’s

from her novels, memoirs, and other writings. Nevertheless, Schreiner’s

useful, not least because of the partially fragmented narrative produced by

Boydell Press, 2003.

University Press, 1987.

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