Novel
God's Step-Children
Sarah Gertrude Millin · 1924
Synopsis
A missionary who has come to bring the Gospel to the Khoikhoi, then known as Hottentots, marries a woman of the people he came to convert and has two children by her; he soon sinks into poverty and degradation. The novel then follows his mixed-race descendants over four generations, in a South Africa divided by race and by class, where each seeks a place and carries, according to the narrative, the weight of that first union.
Context
The author's fourth novel, it was the first to make racial prejudice its central subject, and it is the book that made her known to the American public. The narrative answers a conviction that her earlier writings already showed, that of a white race that had to remain separate from the peoples of the country. Reissued in 1951, the book has since been reread in the light of these views, and the support the author later gave to apartheid has weighed on the place she is given in literary history.
Who it is for
A novel in English, easy to read, but whose racial thesis calls for a critical and informed reading.
Prizes and reception
Her greatest success, often reprinted in the United States; it established her reputation as a novelist, which declined after her death.