Miles Franklin

In 1903 A.G. Stephens, literary editor and mentor, wrote to Miles Franklin about the ' bruise ' scene in My Brilliant Career. 'Is this your experience', he inquired. 'Does it represent your own feelings? Why should the marks and…

Discusses gender relations and fears about ‘the white slave trade’ in Miles Franklin’s unpublished novel.

'Do you remember Miss Spence's novel Clara Morison,' Miles Franklin asked Alice Henry in September 1930. 'I had no idea the dear old valiant was of such stature in that direction. For a literary artist to be drawn away…

Some years ago I was teaching a course on nineteenth-century Australian literature which involved lectures on both Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career (1901) and Joseph Furphy's Such is Life (1903). Writing the lectures started me thinking about the links between…

‘Evidence from the novel, the Franklin Papers at the Mitchell Library, and the wonderfully informative Goulburn Evening Post indicates that while Franklin always insisted “the novel is not my life”, both she and it owed a good deal to 1890s…

From the perspective of 200 I, this book appears to have appeared on the scene at exactly the right time - it was Federation year, women all over Australia were about to get the vote, and many 'brilliant careers' were…

I am acquainted with at least one writer who believes that letter-writing saps creative energy which might be directed to the more public art forms of the novel and the poem. So, a long and thoughtful letter to this writer…

The manuscript of Stella Miles Franklin's play 'The Survivors' is marked 'Shawondasee, August, 1908'. Shawondasee is in the small, historic seaside town of Stonington, Connecticut, visited by Franklin with her friend Mary E. Dreier, President of the New York Women's…

When Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career was published in 1901, members of the public, as well as the extended Franklin family, assumed the work to be autobiographical. Many readers wrote to the young author, directing their letters to 'Sybylla Melvyn…

The trouble with historians, Miles Franklin wrote in 1947, is that they are far too fond of 'repetition' . She may well have been right. This is by no means the first attempt to assess the radicalism of My Brilliant…

In recent decades, the name 'Miles Franklin' has been best known for the Miles Franklin Literary Award, an antipodean Booker or Pulitzer. It is given annually to the author of the previous year's novel of the highest literary merit, a…

A listing of Miles Franklin’s uncollected topical writings, with introduction.

Sybylla Melvyn, narrator of Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career (1901), has troubled readers from the start. William Blackwood, editor, felt impelled to 'tone down' her narrative, and 'religious, political and sex-problem passages' made Henry Lawson 'blush'. The 'trouble' with Sybylla…