Rhodes By Sarah Gertrude Millin
Rhodes By Sarah Gertrude Millin
Hardcover
Publisher: Chatto & Windus 1952 New and Revised Edition.
Used - Very Good. This book is in very good condition. The DJ has some limited signs of wear and tear but the pages are clean, intact and the spine remains undamaged. This book has clearly been well maintained and looked after thus far. The book is protected with a Cellophane cover. Red cloth. Nice bright, strong and square copy with no markings. Some foxing on the map endpages.
A revised enlarged edition of the definitive biography of Rhodes, by South Africa's greatest novelist. Its subject, the tubercular diamond-digger whose youthful vision of the Africa of the future, and his life devotion to it, made him one of our most famous empire-builders, is an enthralling one.
South African novelist, born in Lithuania, educated in Kimberley. Her obsession as a novelist was with the supposed dire consequences of miscegenation. As J. M. Coetzee has shown in White Writing (1988), though she was Jewish her assumptions about race were derived from Victorian anthropologists and Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer. Yet this discredited outlook, so widespread at the time, did not prevent her from writing some good novels with genuine tragic pathos, such as God's Stepchildren (1924), with its haunted, ‘mixed-blood’ protagonist, Barry. Despite her racialism Millin was vehemently anti-Nazi and attacked Nazi ideology in The Herr Witchdoctor (1941). As well as many novels, including Adam's Rest (1922), The Sons of Mrs. Aab (1931), and King of the Bastards (1950), she wrote autobiographical memoirs, war diaries, short stories, and two distinguished biographies, Rhodes (1933) and General Smuts (1936). In such non-fiction as The South Africans (1926, revised edition 1934), she addressed the potential for racial conflict.
