The Reeling Earth

1945 first edition  published by Faber and Faber Limited. 305 pages. Dedication in front reads: To jan Christian Smuts - Sarah Gertrude Millin - 1945. Dust jacket has lots of wear around edges.

At the end of the first year of the war General Hertzog was thanking God the the Allies were beaten; while General Smuts was declaring his faith in the invincibility of England, even though the 'bedrock' of disaster had not yet been reached. These were the last entries recorder in Mrs Millin's diary for that year published in 1944.

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.