Miles Franklin

Miles Franklin grew up on Brindabella Station, an isolated property in the Brindabella Valley of New South Wales, and was taught at home until 1889. Her first novel, My Brilliant Career, came out in 1901 from Blackwoods of Edinburgh, with the backing of the writer Henry Lawson. It follows Sybylla Melvyn, a headstrong teenager growing up in the bush. A sequel, My Career Goes Bung, in which Sybylla meets Sydney’s literary crowd, was not published until 1946.

In 1906 she moved to Chicago, where she worked for the National Women’s Trade Union League and helped edit its magazine, Life and Labor. During the First World War she joined the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and worked as a cook in a 200-bed tent hospital attached to the Serbian army in Macedonia.

Back in Australia from 1932, she wrote historical novels of the bush, many under the pen name Brent of Bin Bin. All That Swagger (1936), published under her own name, won the S. H. Prior Memorial Prize. She backed young writers and new literary journals, and never married. When she died in 1954, she left her estate to fund an annual award, the Miles Franklin Award. Since 2013 the Stella Prize, named after her first name, has gone to Australian women writers.

Start with My Brilliant Career, or watch Gillian Armstrong’s 1979 film of it, starring Judy Davis, and then read the book.