The Reader, the Text and the Editor: On the Making of Olive Schreiner’s Letters online and The World’s Great Question

There is a gap between Olive Schreiner’s impressive output of publications, and the ‘damaged, unproductive’ view prevalent in early biographical writing about her, which has occurred in significant part as the result of the authorial and editorial activities of her estranged husband. For readers who want to explore further, earlier editions of Schreiner’s letters have suffered from similar problems of selectivity and interpretive heavy-handedness. However, a number of issues which have arisen in two different approaches to editing – in producing the complete Olive Schreiner Letters Online and the print selection The World’s Great Question – are discussed. These suggest that the relationship between the reader, the text and the editor has some intractable aspects and that re-positioning the reader in relation to the text needs to take full account of the ‘lateness of the reader’ and the insoluble problems surrounding this.