Franklin, Miles (1879-1954), was an Australian novelist. She is best known for her novels of Australian pioneering life from a feminist perspective, especially her first novel, My Brilliant Career (1901).
Written when Franklin was 19, My Brilliant Career is set in the Australian bush, where she grew up. Franklin used a male pen name (author’s name) to distract attention from the novel’s autobiographical elements. However, critics still emphasized these elements in their response to the novel. The autobiographical elements were also emphasized in the novel’s adaptation into an internationally praised motion picture in 1979. Franklin wrote a sequel, The End of My Career, in 1902, but the book contained thinly disguised portraits of Sydney celebrities and so was not published. After extensive revisions, it appeared in 1946 as My Career Goes Bung: Purporting to Be the Autobiography of Sybylla Penelope Melvyn.
Adopting a more successful male disguise, Franklin published six novels of pioneer life in Australia under the name Brent of Bin Bin. The first novel was Up the Country: A Tale of Australian Squattocracy (1928). She also wrote five novels under her own name. The best known is All That Swagger (1936), a chronicle about an Irish family in Australia. Franklin wrote numerous plays, but most were never performed and remain unpublished. An autobiography, Childhood at Brindabella: My First Ten Years, was published in 1962, after her death. Collections of her journalism, her letters, and portions of her diaries have also appeared since her death.
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin was born on Oct. 14, 1879, in Talbingo, New South Wales. In 1906, she moved to the United States, where she worked for the National Women’s Trade Union League in Chicago and wrote Some Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909), a novel about the women’s suffrage movement. Suffrage is the right to vote. Franklin moved to England in 1915. She served as a nurse in Serbia in 1917 and 1918, during World War I (1914-1918). From 1919 to 1932, she lived in London before returning to Australia to look after elderly relatives. Her will provided for the annual Miles Franklin Literary Award for the best Australian novel. Franklin died on Sept. 19, 1954.
