A Great Australian: Colin Roderick's Miles Franklin

Authors

  • Donat Gallagher

Abstract

Colin Roderick, Miles Franklin: Her Brilliant Career. Adelaide: Rigby, 1982. $19.99. 199 pp.

Nowadays Miles Franklin is best known as the author of her first novel, written when she was only twenty years old and titled with conscious irony My Brilliant Career. My Career Goes Bung was written two years later. Both titles are prophetic, both misleading. Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin was never to become a "success," if success is measured by sales and critical acclaim, by offices held or honours received. Large numbers of her rejected manuscripts have never been printed. Of all her many books only My Brilliant Career and All That Swagger sold at all well or received recognition in her lifetime. Until the revival of feminism and the renascence of the Australian film industry brought My Brilliant Career back into well-deserved prominence, All That Swagger was her only work still read, and then mainly by students of Australian literature. Apart from a few private testimonials, Stella's devoted work for feminist and trade union causes went unhonoured. Her only significant memorial, the annual Miles Franklin Award for an Australian novel or play, was created by herself.

But from another point of view Stella's life was inspiring. The issues to which she principally devoted her energies apart from her own writing were Feminism, Trades Unionism, Australianism and Australian Literature. It is open to anyone to withhold sympathy from any of these causes, or to quarrel with Stella's understanding of them. But it is impossible to follow her life through Professor Cohn Roderick's new biography, Miles Franklin: Her Brilliant Career, without being moved by the self-sacrifice, energy, persistence and courageous humour which marked her devotion. She did not merely campaign against the degradations of domestic service: she worked as a domestic so that she could campaign with authority. Her life is her monument. Miles Franklin was a woman in whom high spirit and footloose adventurousness mingled with love of home and devotion to family, in whom a formidable fighting spirit was balanced by loyalty and adaptability and capacity for friendship. Professor Roderick is by no means an uncritical admirer of his many-sided subject, but the strength of his biography is that the abundance of fact aliows the reader to draw conclusions separate from those of the author.

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Published

2016-04-20

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