Millin was born in
Žagarė,
Kovno Governorate on 19 March 1889. She was the eldest child and only daughter of Isaiah Liebson, a Jewish merchant, and his wife, Olga Friedmann. Five months later her parents, Isaiah and Olga, immigrated to
Cape Colony 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 1 December 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. She died in Johannesburg. == Bibliography ==