Miles Franklin: The Teenager Who Wrote the First Great Australian Novel

Now that the Netflix series has sent the world looking for My Brilliant Career, it is worth pausing on the astonishing person who wrote it — because Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin was barely out of childhood when she did.

She was a bush girl, raised on struggling farms in the mountains of New South Wales, largely self-educated, and not yet twenty when she poured her fury and her longing into a first novel written in the breathless first person of a girl who wants more than the drought and the drudgery will allow. She sent the manuscript out; it reached Henry Lawson, the most famous writer in Australia, who was so struck that he carried it to a publisher in Edinburgh and wrote a preface for it himself. In 1901 it appeared, and a teenager from the bush was suddenly a literary star on the other side of the world.

Franklin never stopped fighting. She spent years in America and Britain working in the women’s movement and social reform, wrote on under a pen name, and returned at last to an Australia that had never quite forgiven her for leaving. When she died in 1954, she left her estate to fund a prize for the novel that best portrays Australian life — and the Miles Franklin Award remains, to this day, the most important literary prize in the country. She turned her own name into a permanent act of encouragement for the writers who came after her.

It began with the book you can now watch, and read. The Erato Press edition carries Lawson’s original preface — the very words that launched her.

Read My Brilliant Career — the Erato Press edition →