MILLIN, SARAH GERTRUDE

Sarah Gertrude Millin (March 1889-July 6, 1968) left Lithuania for South Africa at the age of five months during a time of Jewish emigration as a result of the pogroms there. These migrants comprised the bulk of South Africa’s Jewish population.

PHOTO CAPTION: Sarah Gertrude Millin. SOURCE: EA Library

Millin proved to be one of the most prolific South African English-language authors of her time, both as a novelist and a non-fiction author of biographies, memoirs, and socio-political commentary. Millin probably achieved greater recognition and a larger readership abroad, particularly in the 1920s and 1930s, than she ever did within South Africa.

Sarah Gertrude Millin (née Liebson) grew up on the diamond fields near Kimberley. As a child, Millin was a voracious reader. She attended Beaconsfield boarding school and later Kimberley High School for Girls, taking a first-class Matriculation pass in 1904. She then studied music, also in Kimberley. Her first publications appeared in many newspapers in the 1910-1912 period. Millin married Philip Millin, a journalist studying for the bar, in 1912, and the couple moved to Johannesburg.

Millin initiated her career as a novelist with The Dark River in 1919. The signal fiction work of her career, God’s Stepchildren, was published in 1924. Millin travelled to Europe several times during the 1920s, making the acquaintance of several literary luminaries of the time, including D.H. Lawrence and George Bernard Shaw. Much of Millin’s fiction takes miscegenation as its theme, a subject which was of particular interest to her, and a reality which she found abhorrent. Millin appears to have been lauded as something of an expert on the “Color Question” in England and America of the 1920s, her strongly segregatory vision finding substantial acceptance abroad.

Millin’s most important non-fiction works included The South Africans, a rendering of the people and history of South Africa, and biographies of Rhodes and Jan Christian Smuts. Her access to important South African political figures and, in some instances, their personal papers including those of the Smuts family, aided her in her research.

Millin continued to travel throughout her life, visiting the Soviet Union in the 1930s and Israel shortly after its birth. Millin’s writings in the 1940s-1950s period never attained the level of acclaim realised by some of her earlier works. In her later years, she became a proponent of the South African government’s plan of “separate development,” and an active supporter of Ian Smith’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) in Rhodesia. By the 1960s she found herself chastised in some international literary circles as a supporter of apartheid. Millin’s last published novel, Goodbye, Dear England, appeared in 1965.

At the time of her death, she left behind a substantial body of work with an impact on the historical development of English language South African fiction, and a legacy increasingly tainted by her views on questions of race.

JOSHUA LAZERSON