Sarah Gertrude Millin's greatest success was her 1924 novel, God's Step-children; it is her only work that remains fairly consistently in print, and it is the novel that almost invariably marks her place in literary histories. Because of the implicit racism with which Millin handles its subject--the destructive effects of miscegenation--this work and, for that matter, her career were for some time excluded from such histories. As southern African literary history began to be taken seriously by scholars, however, it became difficult for them to ignore the most prominent writer between Olive Schreiner and Nadine Gordimer.

Millin was, after all, the leading South African literary figure for more than thirty years; she wrote seventeen novels, two major biographies, two autobiographies, six "war diaries," a volume of short stories, a collection of essays, and a sociological account of South Africa that evolved through several popular versions. She was also a...