By Helen Elliott
Credit:
BIOGRAPHY
Miles Franklin Undercover
Kerrie Davies
Allen & Unwin, $34.99
The reviewer in The Sydney Morning Herald, on September 28, 1901, of debut novelist Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career was lemony about the heroine: “Bold, forward, and selfish Sybylla is the sort of girl that is happily rare in Australia.” Note: happily rare. Given it was a close self-portrait, the writer might have felt as slapped as her fictional admirers. Despite that review, fame descended upon the young Miles Franklin and with it the confusion of celebrity. Academic and journalist Kerrie Davies probes this confusion in her account of the following decade of Franklin’s headlong life. It seems so very, very long ago.
A wildly intellectual girl growing up in wildly unintellectual Australia, Miles, or Stella as she was then, had ideas, unhappily rare at the time. Australian literary culture was yet to emerge, so Stella Franklin devoured books from everywhere and a particular American genius is worth a second look. In 1879, Mrs Franklin was giving birth to her firstborn in up-country NSW; in London, Henry James was giving birth to his novel The Portrait of a Lady. The Australian baby was christened Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin and James christened his lady, even more fantastically, Isabel Archer. But it is Isabel’s great friend, Henrietta Stackpole, who is relevant to Miles. Henrietta is a journalist, a lady journalist. She canters about the world observing, questioning, delving into the stories beyond the masks. At times, she went undercover! Armed! Undeterred!
Miles Franklin was 19 when she wrote My Brilliant Career, 21 when it was published and not the girl her family required her to be. She was not unique. Australian readers might identify an earlier version of Sybylla in Ethel Turner’s Judy, the young girl who captivated every young reader of Seven Little Australians (1894). Turner’s opening line, “Without doubt Judy was the worst of the seven, probably because she was the cleverest”, will still cause intellectual calamity in some young girls. Imagine that line in 1894. Judy doesn’t conform to the dreamy version of Bush Maid, so (spoiler alert) had to be killed by the falling tree. Judy’s death is a lifelong grief for many readers. Turner, coincidentally, wrote her novel at 19. It is still in publication and still the most famous work in Australian literature.
The young Miles Franklin would have identified with Judy. But in her novel, Judy/Sybylla doesn’t die, she is allowed a possible “brilliant” career, to progress to Henrietta/Sybylla. We are who we are because of the books we read when young, when every page of every book mediated between us and the alarming, thrilling world.
Miles Franklin’s career took an interesting turn after she found fame.Credit: Alamy
More people will be familiar with the 1979 film My Brilliant Career than the 1901 novel. In Gillian Armstrong’s film, made in the exhilarating gust of second-wave feminism, Judy Davis’ Sybylla was an Australian version of an original brilliant friend. The film exhibits the dynamic of art, the new a homage to the old. Perhaps Davies’ Miles Franklin Undercover is a further dialogue with originality and the new? Sybylla here is the brilliant friend whose career goes bung because she goes bung. Davies investigates why, asking, through a combination of fiction and authorial voice, what was happening. Too much fame? Too little money? Too much Australia?
Franklin’s life unspools within an addition to the title: “the little known years when she created her own brilliant career”. These years are the decade or so just before the First World War with Franklin in Sydney, Melbourne and America. Quick-witted, confident, outrageous and virginal, Franklin was extremely interested in relations between the sexes. She also – and this is significant – had long periods of illness. But it is gender interaction that most interests Davies. The Franklin in her book is often a heroine escaping from Victorian romances, needing the admiration of men, addicted to flirting but annoyed with love declarations. A perceptive analyst wasn’t available, but she had friends.
My Brilliant Career was first published in London through the kindness of Henry Lawson and championed by various powerful men, including Banjo Patterson, who might have fallen in love with her. And she with him? Davies suggests that she might have, although Franklin remained intellectually more interested in political ideas than men. She knew a lot about men, and she knew who had power, but agreed with her friend, the Australian feminist Rose Scott, about masculinity. Scott was famous for saying she wanted men’s respect, not their love.
Scott had written to Franklin saying: “I lived your book with you … I cannot disassociate yourself from the heroine”. Through Scott and her circle of thoughtful, political, independent women, Franklin was able to discover aspects of herself that were suppressed by trying to please the world. She became an excellent journalist writing under pseudonyms because it was terrifying being the famous Bush Maid, Miles.
Most courageously, she went undercover as an extremely efficient maid in some grand houses in Melbourne and Sydney when both cities were still the Wild West. These jobs didn’t last long, but they gave her insight into working conditions as well as considerable intellectual ammunition. Her manuscript about this remains unpublished.
So much has been said about Franklin, but there is always more to know, and this keenly researched and lively introduction to her vitality and vulnerability will introduce her to a wider audience.
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