| Intro | South African writer |
| Was |
Writer Biographer |
| From | South Africa |
| Type |
Literature Science |
| Gender | female |
| Birth | 19 March 1889 |
| Death |
6 July 1968 (aged 79 years) |
Sarah Gertrude Millin, née Liebson (19 March 1889 – 6 July 1968), who was born in Zagar, Lithuania on March 19, 1889, was one of a family of seven children. Five months later her parents, Isaiah and Olga, immigrated to South Africa and the family settled in Beaconsfield near Kimberley. In 1894, when she was six years old, they moved to the diamond diggings on the banks of the Vaal River in the Kimberley area where her father opened a trading store. This environment was to provide the setting for much of her future work that combined a love of the South African landscape with an abhorrence of the poverty and squalor in which most of the diggers lived. After matriculating at Kimberley High School for Girls in 1904 she chose not to take up the bursaries offered to her to attend the university at the South African College in Cape Town but instead studied music in Kimberley. She obtained a piano teacher’s certificate but never practiced that career. From the age of six she had been convinced that writing was her destiny and had begun writing short stories at an early age. Some of her first compositions appeared in newspapers in the years 1910 to 1912.
On December 1, 1912 she married Philip Millin and they settled in Johannesburg. Philip, a lawyer who later became a judge of the Supreme Court, encouraged her literary ambitions. Philip Millin died of heart failure on the bench while she had just begun to write her autobiography The Measure of My Days, an event which affected her deeply (Margaret Lane, reviewing the autobiography in the Sunday Times).