ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses work on stories in two kinds of documents of life, letters and diaries and explores some ideas for identifying and understanding stories drawn from Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, specifically from his chapter 'Story Time'. It discusses stories in my earlier work on women's wartime diaries written for the radical social research organisation Mass Observation, and concludes with a short discussion on stories in documents of life more broadly. As a result of trying out Certeau's framework, around 34 or so of Schreiner's addressees received stories in her letters to them, with this by no means evenly distributed across addressees. Looking across the 97 stories identified in more detail, there seem to be five related structural dimensions to them which help delineate Schreiner's epistolary story-telling, as she articulates them in particular ways according to who she is writing to.
