by Bill Holloway

Dale Spender, in Writing a New World (1988), refers to Catherine Spence (1825-1910), Rose Scott (1847-1925), Alice Henry (1857-1943) and Miles Franklin (1879-1954) as “quite a dynasty of women, all unmarried, all practical philanthropists and reformers, all deeply interested in the cause of women”.

We’ve skipped over Alice Henry, but Miles Franklin, in her writing and in her life as an activist, is central to the idea of the Independent Woman.

It is well known that Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career (1901) as a teenager. She says she dashed it off in one go, but working back from the semi-autobiographical Cockatoos it’s clear she workshopped chapters over a couple of years with friends; kids, picnicking, reading and talking in the back paddocks where adults were less likely to find them and give them jobs.

She had trouble finding a publisher and eventually sent the ms to her hero, Henry Lawson, who took it with him to the UK in 1900 and handed it on to his own publishers, Blackwoods of Edinburgh. And so it was, some time in 1901, that Franklin, going down one day to the end of the track to get the mail found not only her first ever letter from another country, but a parcel of six books:

But they were all the same book. Each had the same picture on the cover. I had never seen so many of one book except school readers. And the title of the book was my spoof autobiography – and there was my name in print below it!!! It looked so different in print – so conspicuous somehow, that I was frightened.

The great difficulty for Franklin was that her book was both popular and was treated as factual, not least by her neighbours. “The literalness with which My Brilliant Career was taken was a shock to one of any imagination.” And of course, although the plot was a complete invention, the characters were drawn from life, very well drawn too, so the “literalness” was difficult to refute, and this caused her ongoing problems with the little farming community she lived in, her wider family, and with her mother in particular, who had to endure her fall in caste being made the subject of popular discussion.

Franklin’s response over the next couple of years was to pen two further ‘autobiographies’ – The End of My Career and On the Outside Track – using basically the same characters, which, if published, would have provided the basis for a very post-modern discussion on the intersection of fact and fiction, with the author writing of herself as both a fictional author and the fictional subject of the fictional author’s mock autobiography. However, neither was published, at least at that time, and eventually Franklin withdrew My Brilliant Career from republication as well.

The End of My Career became My Career Goes Bung (1946), and is the source of the quotes above. On the Outside Track was more drastically altered to become Cockatoos (1954), by her alter ego Brent of Bin Bin.

My Brilliant Career may be compared in some ways with the stories by Steele Rudd, later published as On Our Selection (1899), which began appearing in the Bulletin in 1895. Both are unashameably Australian and unaffected in their use of colloquial language; both deal with the problems of struggling selectors; and in both cases the writers are clearly of the people about whom they write. But one difference is telling, Franklin writes as a woman, and argues persuasively throughout for the emancipation of women from the compulsion to be married, to be lackeys to their husbands, to be martyrs to endless childbearing. Rudd agrees that women in the Bush are doing it tough, but doesn’t suggest a remedy, or that things might be different. Franklin does:

No I would never marry. I would procure some occupation in which I could tread my life out, independent of the degradation of marriage

is her heroine Sybylla’s response on receiving her first proposal (from the jackeroo, Hawden). And although the melodrama of the plot of My Brilliant Career depends on Sybylla alternately accepting and rejecting the young squatter, Harold Beecham’s proposals, in the end she says no: “He offered me everything – but control.”

Independence is central to Franklin’s early writing, even Sybylla’s mother ‘wished she had been trained to do something so that she could be independent and not be dragged in the backwash of man’s mismanagement’ (1946, p.8). Although just a “little bush girl”, Franklin both embodies and tirelessly advocates independence for women, firstly for the women of the Australian bush, then for working women everywhere; independence from degrading marriages, and equality of opportunity – politically, economically and socially – with men.

As an ‘independent woman’ Franklin’s own career was, if not ‘brilliant’, then at least remarkable. After a brief period in Sydney, staying with Rose Scott, basking in the success of My Brilliant Career, meeting Norman Lindsay at the Bulletin, engaging in a risqué flirtation with Banjo Paterson, she struck out as an author, but as I have said, her next two ms were not accepted for publication. Nothing daunted she took positions in Sydney then Melbourne (where she was put in touch with Vida Goldstein) as a trainee nurse and housemaid – to gather material for her next book she said, but more likely because she was desperate to earn an income. The resulting book, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909) was at least published. Then in 1906 she sailed for America, arriving in San Francisco six days after the great earthquake.

She appears to have spent some time working in relief camps outside San Francisco, then a few months working her way across the country as a maid in up-market hotels, before ending up in Chicago. There, with introductions from Goldstein to American women activists, she met Alice Henry (via Jane Addams at Hull House) with whom she was to work for the next nine years in the National Women’s Trade Union League, on the union journal Life and Labor, as secretary to National President, Margaret Robins, and representing the Chicago branch of the Stenographers and Typists Union. Franklin travelled with Robins around the country and often spoke at meetings. But she was also often ill, particularly following news of the death of her sister in 1907, and was forced to rest, though still finding time to write.

She worked on revising The End of My Career, which was rejected again, then on The Net of Circumstance (1915) for Mills & Boon (not then the publisher of formula romances that it is today) using the strange pseudonym ‘Mr & Mrs Ogniblat L’Artsau’, two plays, and another novel, On Dearborn Street, another anti-romance written this time from the perspective of the failed suitor.

With the outbreak of war in Europe she became restless, and at the end of 1915 left Chicago for London. There she was involved in anti-conscription rallies and volunteer work for soldiers’ wives and babies, barely supporting herself with freelance journalism and shifts at the Women’s Freedom League’s Minerva Cafe.

In July 1917 she signed up for six months in Macedonia as a kitchen orderly with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, funded by donations and run by women doctors. Her field hospital, at Ostrovo, was attached to the Serbian Army, but  well behind the front. Franklin worked hard as usual and was soon the matron’s offsider in charge of stores. Early in 1918 she returned to London, ill with both influenza and malaria and was forced to recuperate for several months, although still writing articles and plays and attempting to have On Dearborn Street published.

Finding work as a secretary, she was able to carry on with her writing and maintain her connections with the women’s movement in London, except for a brief visit home in 1923, until 1927 when she returned to NSW for 3 years to care for her mother. But she was back in London again, living with Mary Fullerton and Mabel Singleton, in 1931 and 32 before finally returning home to Sydney where she remained, active in literary circles, until her death in 1954.

During the London years she began writing as Brent of Bin Bin, a secret which was maintained until after her death, as well as publishing under her own name, and in both guises began to achieve some success, but at the cost of giving up her idiosyncratic independent heroines, instead concentrating on epic sagas in the NSW high country based on the histories of her mother’s and father’s pioneering families.

Stella Franklin the reformer and agitator, was indeed independent, hard working and effective; Miles Franklin the author was initially successful because My Brilliant Career was a young woman’s cry from the heart, but it was a voice she was unable, and eventually too old, to maintain. Still, she refocussed and revived her career. Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin the woman was never dependent on men, not for approval nor for support.

Nevertheless, in her writing and in her life, Miles was torn about sex. In one place she comments “only in marriage can respectable women satisfy curiosity.”  All her life she flirted outrageously with men, her letters to friends often mention men who have proposed to her, for men found her lively and attractive.

In My Career Goes Bung, writing of her first visit to Sydney, she boasts of visiting Goring Hardy, Australia’s “one great literary man”, in his flat, alternately inviting his attentions and rebuffing him. In Cockatoos Ignez, the MF character, in the same situation is kissed. She is immensely upset by this and flies to her cousin Milly Poole in the bush to be assured she won’t get pregnant; and this fear probably explains also Sybylla’s exaggerated response to Harry, when he kisses her and she strikes him across the face with a whip.

When Franklin leaves for America in 1906 her cousin Edwin Bridle believes that she is his fiancée; in Chicago she goes about with both (the married) Bill Lloyd and his playboy younger brother Demarest (portrayed as Cavarley and Bobby Hoyne in On Dearborn Street) who both – separately – offer to marry her. In her diary she records mixing with the ‘free love’ crowd around the Chicago writers Floyd Dell and Theo Dreiser, but says they disgusted her.

In On Dearborn Street, which like My Career Goes Bung was rejected by publishers for being too “sexual”, in response to one of those offers (and probably referring to her engagement to Bridle) she writes:

One man nearly as good as you was once engaged to me, yet I’m free! Thank God! They say any fool can get married but it takes a devilish clever woman to remain an old maid, so that is the distinction I covet.(1981, p.120)

When Franklin became famous she was just 21, she was 27 when she sailed for America, leaving behind Edwin Bridle, and well into her 30s when she rejected Demarest Lloyd. By the end of the war she was nearly 40, and so, whether she intended it or not, an “old maid” is what she became. But let Miles/Sybylla have the last word [I think she’s referring to CH Spence and Rose Scott]:

The two greatest women in Australia are unmarried, and it would be a good plan for a few more to support them, to remain free to ventilate the state of marriage and motherhood and to reform its conditions. (1946, p.179)

.

see also earlier Miles Franklin articles in AWWC:
Miles Franklin, Nemari Ništa (extract, MF’s time in Macedonia during WWI)
Miles Franklin, Nemari Ništa (review)
Miles Franklin in America (essay)
Miles Franklin, Alice Henry (newspaper story)
Miles Franklin, ‘Australian Writers need Courage’ (newspaper article)
Miles Franklin, My Career Goes Bung (review)
Miles Franklin, ‘The Old Post’ (short story)
also
Miles Franklin page (The Australian Legend)
for MF’s relationship with Mary Fullerton and Mabel Singleton (and the Victorian suffragist movement) see my review of Sylvia Martin’s  Passionate Friends

Earlier posts in this series:
The Independent Woman in Australian Literature
Bev Roberts ed., Miss D and Miss N: An Extraordinary Partnership (review)
Elizabeth Macarthur
Eleanor Dark, Timeless Land trilogy (review)
Caroline Chisholm, Married and Independent
Caroline Chisholm, Radical
Catherine Helen Spence, Woman’s Place in the Commonwealth
Catherine Helen Spence: An Autobiography (review)
Clare Wright, You daughters of freedom (review)
Janette M Bomford, That Dangerous and Persuasive Woman: Vida Goldstein (review)
Australian Suffragists
The New Woman in Australia
AWW Generation 1, 1788-1890
The Bulletin Years, 1890-1920