Introduction

Born into a modest Jewish family in Lithuania in 1888, Sarah Gertrude Liebson was a five-month-old baby when she arrived in what would prove to be, in every sense but the literal one, her native land. In the words of her biographer, she was ‘above all a white South African’, her ardent love for her country, and her passionate espousal of the lifestyle and mindset of the community she was brought up in, ultimately leading her to relinquish the liberal and progressive ideas she had cherished as a young woman and adhere unquestioningly to apartheid.

Her early years were spent living in a settlement by the River Vaal, where her father set up as a trader; the area owed its wealth to the burgeoning diamond-digging industry. Despite securing the family’s economic security, he also exposed his wife and large family to the crude lives and attitudes of the diggers, the harshness of which made a strong impact on Gertrude as a child – as powerful as the inspirational and formative role her education at the local schoolhouse had. Similarly, her direct experience of the ruthlessness and violence of troops (from both the British and the Dutch Transvaal sides) during the Boer wars marked her imagination and hardened the attitudes of those around her.

As she and KM would acknowledge during their sporadic correspondence, they had a lot in common – at the heart of which was the complex white colonial heritage, which had enabled them to experience childhood and their early growing-up years in the cocoon of white social privilege, only to find that, from the vantage point of the metropolis, they were instinctively considered more lowly and more uncouth than their London-born contemporaries. Their education was in many ways comparable, with music playing a key role, avid reading taking up much of their free time, and leading to an instinctive, unshakeable belief from an early age that they would become writers. More poignantly, both experienced the shattering effect of losing a dearly loved younger brother in the war, a calamity that greatly heightened their initial, instinctive pacifism when fighting began. It was also the distress of bereavement that incited Gertrude, by then married to her Johannesburg-based English husband, Philip Millin, to complete her first novel, having previously written only essays and short stories.