The real story of Miles Franklin's not‑so‑brilliant career

Topic:Books

Miles Franklin spent her life reinventing herself and swapping between various pseudonyms.

With the release of Netflix's new TV adaptation of My Brilliant Career last week and the announcement of the winner of this year's Miles Franklin Literary Award earlier this month, August feels like the month of Miles.

Hey, maybe it's the year of Miles, with a recent musical and novel about the writer the latest additions to the growing Miles Franklin canon.

A portrait of Stella Miles Franklin at 21 years old.

Yet so much of what most people know about the woman who gives her name to not one, but two, of Australia's most prestigious literary awards (the other being the Stella Prize) is limited to what we can draw from her partly biographical debut novel, My Brilliant Career.

That's just her early life and Franklin always insisted the book was less autobiographical than it seemed.

Beyond her gutsy resistance to marriage in favour of her writing career (like her heroine Sybylla), the author's life was filled with failures, flirtations and even a stint under cover.

The 'bush girl' becomes a literary superstar

Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin was born in Talbingo, NSW, in 1879, into the squattocracy, and spent the first decade of her life at her family's farm, Brindabella Station.

A depression and drought saw the family (Franklin was the eldest of seven children) move to shabbier living situations, as did so many farming families at the time.

Stella Miles Franklin, six years old.

Despite the family's increasingly dire circumstances, Franklin accessed other worlds through books and writing.

By 16, she was writing articles for the local newspaper and working on her first novel, a London-set drama about lords and ladies.

Historian Alecia Simmonds, co‑host of ABC podcast The Dead Can't Sue, says: "Literature and writing are the one form of artistic, intellectual, creative expression that women are given [in this period].

Franklin was expected to marry and dedicate herself to housework and children, but instead, Simmonds says, "She really wrote her way out of that destiny".

"Like so many feminists, it [Franklin's desire to write] comes from a collision between the constraints that are placed on women and girls, and the desire for a world beyond those constraints," Alecia Simmonds says.

After being encouraged by the local newspaper editor to write what she knew, 19‑year‑old Franklin began work on My Brilliant Career. She wrote it over a six‑month period, at night, after her farm chores and sibling minding were done.

In 1899, Franklin wrote to one of the country's biggest publishers, modern‑day booksellers Angus & Robertson.

She asked them to kindly read her manuscript and to "state whether or not it is fit for publication". They deemed her manuscript unworthy (a decision George Robertson would later regret).

Miles Franklin's 1899 letter to Angus & Robertson.

Undeterred, Franklin wrote to her literary hero, the bush poet Henry Lawson. With his help, My Brilliant Career was published by British publishers in 1901. Lawson's preface revealed that despite the male pen‑name, the author is "just a little bush girl".

It became an international sensation.

"She offers readers a pure bush ideal at a moment of extraordinary turmoil in Australia," Simmonds says. "This is the beginning of Australia's national literary culture."

Miles goes under cover

The success of her debut novel gave Franklin access to the Sydney intelligentsia, and she was befriended by the famous suffragist Rose Scott. Franklin charmed everyone she met, including many men.

"Miles says no to marriage … but she really loves flirting," Simmonds says.

Between 1899 and 1902, she had a flirtation with the other pre‑eminent bush poet of her time, Banjo Paterson (of Waltzing Matilda fame). She later said he was "the most sophisticated man that ever attempted to woo me sexually".

Franklin seemed to be on the cusp of a glittering literary career, but her next few books were rejected by publishers.

Perhaps that's because the success of her first book hadn't rescued her from poverty, leaving her with little time to work on her craft.

Miles Franklin (pictured here as a maid) overheard her employers and their guests discussing her book without realising the author was serving them.

At this point she could've chosen to become a nurse, governess or teacher, but instead, inspired by "girl stunt reporters", she decided to "go under cover" as a maid and servant for wealthy families, taking the name Sarah Frankling, in an effort to investigate the conditions and complaints of the servant class.

"If you are a domestic servant, your day starts at dawn, and this is what Miles writes about," Simmonds says. "They are horrific conditions. You're paid a pittance."

While she was unable to publish her manuscript about her servant experiences over defamation concerns, she began writing for The Sydney Morning Herald.

A broad abroad

With introductions to American feminists facilitated by Scott and Vida Goldstein, and with the hope of getting one in her mounting pile of manuscripts published, Franklin moved to the US in 1906, at 26 years old.

The move led her sister Linda to write to her: "You bad girl, to leave such a lot of broken hearts behind."

By 1907, Franklin was living in Chicago, a bustling city of extreme luxury and poverty, where immigrants toiled in slaughterhouses and sweatshops.

There she worked with social reformer Alice Henry at the National Women's Trade Union League of America.

"Miles is turning up to picket lines," Simmonds explains. "She's there in the rallies. She's running around, collecting strikers' stories and she's witnessing police brutality. She is absolutely in the thick of it."

But it's also in Chicago that Franklin's insomnia and anxiety culminate in a nervous breakdown.

"There is a bush girl in her that just constantly yearns to go home," Simmonds says.

Women delegates to the 1912 Chicago convention of Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party. Miles Franklin is second from left.

Throughout all this, Franklin continued writing and flirting. She became embroiled with two (yes, two) millionaire brothers, one of whom was already married.

"She's politically opposed to marriage, as are many women at this time but … she is open to the idea of marrying [the younger divorced brother]," Simmonds says.

Franklin's biographer Jill Roe alleges the affair ended in 1914 because of an attempted abduction and rape.

After World War I broke out, Franklin, who was anti‑war, moved to England to help on the home front and write about the war effort. She also worked as a cook and orderly at the Scottish Women's Hospital for Serbian soldiers in Macedonia.

Franklin comes home

By 1925, five of Franklin's siblings had died, and she moved back to Australia in 1927.

A year later, Franklin published a pastoral saga under the name Brent of Bin Bin, the first book in a trilogy and her first hit since My Brilliant Career.

In 1931, her father died and her money ran low. But it's also around this time that she returned to her original pen‑name, publishing All that Swagger, the novel that restored her reputation in Australia, in 1936.

Franklin began devoting herself towards the very idea of Australian literature itself, championing her peers and local literary journals. She mentored younger writers and used her influence to campaign against censorship.

Is it appropriate for historians to gossip about the dead? Associate professors Alecia Simmonds and Leigh Boucher aren't afraid to find out.

In 1941, after World War II broke out, Franklin attended a few meetings of the Australia First Movement. The movement was against the war, prioritising Australia over a European conflict, but this ultranationalism slipped into fascist and Nazi territory.

Franklin's friend and publisher Percy Stephensen was one of the movement's leaders.

"But [her biographer Roe contends] that she clearly opposed the views of the movement around Nazism," Simmonds explains. "And she claimed to have not seen the antisemitism until a friend from overseas points it out."

Simmonds suggests it's not straightforward; Franklin attended more than one Australia First meeting and continued to subscribe to the movement's magazine.

"Miles also writes to a friend and says, 'This movement is very much needed'," Simmonds says.

Franklin, like many 20th century feminists and thinkers, held eugenicist ideas.

The Dead Can't Sue's Leigh Boucher suggests Franklin "is a complicated, complex thinker in a period of intense political and ideological contest and contradiction".

Mother Miles?

In 1946, Franklin finally published the sequel to My Brilliant Career: My Career Goes Bung.

By this stage, she was celebrated as a founding matriarch of Australia's national literary tradition.

But Simmonds says that obscures the legacy of other Australian women writers of her time, including Ada Cambridge, Rosa Praed, Barbara Baynton and Mary Fortune.

"There's no one mother … she's part of this groundswell of women writers."

Miles Franklin's ashes were scattered close to Talbingo, her grandmother's grand estate where she had been born.

Franklin died in 1954, at age 74. She had published somewhere between 14 and 19 books (depending on whether you count edited collections) under all her various pen‑names, but none ever reached the fame of her first.

The Miles Franklin Literary Award, Australia's most prestigious literary prize, exists today because she left her estate, valued at £8,922 (just over $200,000 in today's terms), to establish an award for Australian literature. Nobody knew she'd been squirrelling that money away by living frugally.

Simmonds says, beyond her writing, she'd like Franklin to be remembered as "a social justice activist, feminist, nationalist and an internationalist and this great big, fabulous flirt".

This article is based on research by Alecia Simmonds

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