Miles Franklin

by Jill Roe

  3

  FROM POSSUM GULLY TO PENRITH: 1899‒1902

  You have made the Australian girl appear from behind her gum-trees.1

  My Brilliant Career was the first and most famous of Miles Franklin’s published books and plays. Now regarded as an Australian classic, its path to publication in 1901 has been closely scrutinised — but the original manuscript has been lost. The nearest whiff of it comes in a relative’s claim that her mother saw the original manuscript in a pile of exercise books in Miles’s bedroom on a visit to ‘Stillwater’ in January 1901. Not even the publisher’s proofs survive, or if they do, they have not been seen for over a century.2

  A surprising amount of evidence exists on the prehistory of the manuscript. Most likely Miss Gillespie and her teacher friend Miss Eliza Kellett from nearby Run-o’-Waters School were the first to see it. Miss Gillespie’s support for her pupil’s writings was unwavering, and Miss Kellett, who attended Thornford School picnics and met the young Stella there, became interested too. ‘One day Stella showed Eliza the book she had written, My Brilliant Career, and asked her would she please correct the grammar, [which] she did with pleasure.’ Miss Gillespie was weak on grammar (as was young Stella Franklin). Later, Eliza was given a copy of My Brilliant Career, and fifty years on, Miles visited her in retirement on Sydney’s North Shore.3

  Next to see the manuscript was T. J. Hebblewhite, the Goulburn newspaperman whose advice on her previous effort was so apposite. Hebblewhite is vague about dates, merely stating that Miss Gillespie brought a revised manuscript along to his office on Auburn Street one Saturday morning, but his recollection of first seeing the manuscript is vivid:

  I heard nothing further for some time, and then, again on a Saturday morning, there came Miss Gillespie with another bulky collection of manuscript, foolscap size, written in a firm but unformed hand and headed ‘My Brilliant Career’.

  I sat down to its perusal that evening, and had not covered half a score of pages before I knew that here was a true Australian atmosphere and a descriptive capacity marvellous in a country girl still a long way from being out of her teens. I had often seen where a reviewer of a new book wrote how . . . he found it impossible to stop before reaching the end, and reckoned that this was only an exaggerated way of saying that the book would meet the requirements of an idle and casual hour. But in this case it was the literal truth: I read until I had come to finis in the early hours of Sunday morning. I invited the writer to come into the city, telling her how highly I thought of her new attempt.4

  Hebblewhite goes on to describe his meeting with the writer:

  In due course she came, a shy, plump girl, the picture of rosy health, with a thick braid of hair nearly a yard long hanging down her back. I went over the manuscript with her, pointing out minor literary defects due to lack of training and experience, but had only praise for a realistic fidelity that was everywhere in evidence.

  When copies of the book arrived Miles sent Hebblewhite one of them, and much later, when that was lost, another, inscribed ‘Mr T. J. Hebblewhite in affect. remembrance from his pupil Miles Franklin’. Evidently it was one of the highlights of his life that ‘the bush girl . . . sent the first fruits of her pen’ to him, and he remained convinced that, as a transcript of the Australian bush, My Brilliant Career was the most minutely faithful of all he had seen.5

  Miles Franklin probably called on Hebblewhite in August 1899, when she was approaching her twentieth birthday. A handwritten calendar in the Franklin Papers states that she finished writing My Brilliant Career on 25 March 1899 and undertook the revision from 18 September through to November 1899. Given that she had submitted the first version of her ‘yarn’ to Angus & Robertson on 30 March 1899 — whose reader famously rejected it within the week, ‘a serious mistake’ publisher George Robertson later acknowledged, but he was away at the time — and that in tandem with domestic duties it would hardly be possible to have completed more than technical revisions in two months, the first substantive revision must have occurred in the months between April and September. The first revision was, by Miles’s own account, on the basis of advice proferred by Alex Montgomery on behalf of the Bulletin’s editor J. F. Archibald, to whom she sent the manuscript immediately after the rejection by Angus & Robertson, a sensible move in days when the Bulletin encouraged all sorts of bush writers. It was this second version of the text that Hebblewhite read with such enthusiasm. On 30 July 1899, he wrote to her that he had read her manuscript and it was ‘a distinct and big advance’ on her previous effort. After going over it with her, he offered to send the revised manuscript to literary friends in Sydney.6

  Hebblewhite’s are the first extended comments on the original manuscript of My Brilliant Career. His reactions echo down the years. ‘Is Sybylla’s story partly autobiographical?’ he asked tentatively. With sympathy for ‘the heart-breaking torment of it all’, he ventured to suggest that ‘[Sybylla’s] unfulfilled aspirations and her baffled ambitions were too earnestly, and in places too bitterly, chronicled to be wholly fictitious and baseless romance’.7

  He also noted a pessimistic tendency. From a reading of her earlier work, it seems it was there from the beginning, though whether as a matter of temperament or of genre it would be hard to say. Hebblewhite took the broader view: if her temperament did run to pessimism, that was only typical of a native Australian literature. A significant piece of advice is included: to try her hand at sketches and short stories on bush life at some later time.8

  Hebblewhite returned the manuscript via Miss Gillespie on 16 September 1899, again stressing the importance of style and practice in writing. Two days later, on 18 September, Miles began her final revision. Two months on, it was done. The next day, signing simply as ‘Miles Franklin’, she wrote to the well-known writer Henry Lawson, asking him to read her book. It may be that Hebblewhite’s sympathetic remark about pessimism encouraged her in this bold step, as well as Lawson’s current success with his bush sketches While the Billy Boils (though she admitted she had not had an opportunity to read his prose; it was his poetry that had helped her). With the self-assurance of youth, she went straight to the point, stating that she was merely asking him to ‘run through’ her yarn; if he could advise her on editors and publishers, it would help her ‘out of a deep hole’.9

  It seems she made a similar approach to the critic A. G. Stephens, who ran a literary agency as well as editing the Bulletin’s ‘Red Page’. However, Stephens advised ‘Mr St. M. S. Miles Franklin’ that he charged a fee for the revision of manuscripts — which presumably meant it was out of the question. By contrast, the approach to Lawson paid off. Indeed, it was the making of Miles Franklin.10

  Something in her letter appealed to him. He called for the manuscript, and as soon as he read it one Wednesday, probably in early January, he recognised ‘a big thing’. Responding to ‘Miles Franklin’ that same day, he asked if he could keep the story until his publisher George Robertson returned from England. At that stage he couldn’t tell if it was the work of a man or a woman.11

  He soon found out. In January 1900, Stella Franklin was enrolled as a probationer at Sydney Hospital. There had been talk of her becoming a nurse for some time, and an application was lodged mid-1898, shortly before she began writing My Brilliant Career, but the idea seemed to have fallen into abeyance. According to the six-part serial Miles wrote subsequently, ‘A Ministering Angel: Being the Real Experiences of an Australian Bush Girl’, published in New Idea in 1905 (which is recounted in the first person and is the only surviving evidence) she unexpectedly received an offer of an interview for a month’s position as a trial nurse probationer, unpaid if not continuing afterwards, which she accepted. She was enrolled on condition that her teeth were attended to, and subsequently she had two fillings and two extractions.12

  Once settled in at the hospital in Sydney’s Macquarie Street, it was a simple matter for Miles and Lawson to meet on her day off. As she recalled that first meeting, Lawson called on her ‘to
find out what sort of an animal I was — whether a mate or mere miss’, and arranged for her to visit him and his wife, Bertha, at the Lawsons’ picturesque cottage in North Sydney the next day. Miles was thrilled to find that ‘the perfect big brother of our dreams’ fulfilled all her expectations:

  He was beautifully dressed. His linen was irreproachable. He was tall and slim, with exceptional physical beauty. The beauty of his eyes is also part of his legend. His manner — it had that sensitive warmth, that winning gentleness, that understanding — well, Lawson was as Lawson wrote. You had not to work up to friendliness with him: he was spontaneously a mate.13

  Lawson’s reaction is not recorded but by then he had decided to go to London to further his literary career, and when from there he wrote a preface for My Brilliant Career, he recalled: ‘I saw her before leaving Sydney. She is just a little bush girl . . . She has lived her book and I feel proud of it . . .’14

  Nursing did not suit Stella Franklin any more than governessing and on 22 January 1900 she resigned, ‘for private reasons’. Relatives were disgusted that she did not ‘take to something useful’. However, she may have been worried about things at home. Not only was her mother’s health a continuing concern to her daughters — possibly due to menopausal symptoms — but her brother Mervyn, who had only recently escaped the confines of ‘Stillwater’, was seriously ill at Talbingo. On 15 February, Susannah Franklin got him to a doctor in Tumut, but Mervyn Franklin, ‘boundary rider’, died of typhoid fever at a relative’s place on 21 February 1900, aged sixteen. He was Miles’s favourite brother, ‘so fair-haired and cheerful, you liked comic songs and derided my youthful nostalgia for the moaning ballads,’ she wrote years later when recalling the agony of that time.15

  In retrospect, it seems clear her main reason for leaving nursing was Lawson’s good opinion of her book, which, in a covering letter when resubmitting the manuscript to George Robertson on her behalf in April 1900, he described as ‘the Australian African Farm’, ‘immeasurably ahead of Jane Eyre’. Hebblewhite had advised that she should consider sending material about Australian bush life to English magazines, and Lawson also suggested that she try short sketches.16

  She certainly needed to do something remunerative to avoid being trapped at ‘Stillwater’. Aged twenty-one, with a passion for the arts and a desire to travel, marriage was not on her agenda, and she had now rejected nursing as well as teaching. The most that country girls like her could hope to earn was pocket money from the sale of eggs or cream, which in her case would surely have gone straight into the family coffers.

  Typically, Miles left clues in her writings and fragments of memoir as to what she had in mind. Like many other Australian girls of her day, she thought to become a singer, with writing as a back-up: ‘In those days with the dream idol of [the fictional] Trilby and the living person in Melba, glorious Melba,’ runs a tantalising fragment, possibly from a draft of the novel Cockatoos, which is set in this period.17

  The idea had been growing on her for some time. When Amy Castles, a young singer of about her age who was hailed as the next Melba, sang in Goulburn in mid-1899, Miles did not attend the concert, but she obtained a photo of the young diva.

  Once home, she set to work. Six sketches in the vernacular on ‘Bush Life’, written in 1900, all but one signed ‘S. M. S. Miles Franklin’, survive either in manuscript or in print. All are set locally and sometimes linked by narrator Jim Blackshaw.18

  More stories were written later in the year. Few of these early sketches and essays were published at the time, and only three have been thought worth reprinting since: ‘An Old House Post’, ‘Of Life’ and ‘A Common Case’. Although still readable, they vary in interest and significance, and their value is not so much literary as biographical.19

  Meanwhile, in mid-April, just before he left for London, Lawson had written to Miles at Bangalore that George Robertson was back in Sydney but had not had time to read her manuscript and his firm was umming and ah-ing over it. ‘Shall I leave the story with them or take it with me to England?’ he asked. Miles hastened to forward the necessary powers of attorney to Lawson, who asked Robertson to post the manuscript to him in London, which Robertson duly did. Angus & Robertson may have been the flagship of literary nationalism, but the closest the firm came to 1890s feminism was publishing Louise Mack’s Teens in 1897 and Girls Together in 1898.20

  Five months later, on 6 September 1900, Lawson reported that Edinburgh publisher Blackwood was interested in Miles’s manuscript, and that he had put the matter in the hands of his literary agent, J. B. Pinker, who counted Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells and Henry James among his clients. Lawson enclosed Pinker’s memorandum of agreement for signature (a fair copy of which survives in Miles’s publishing records): ‘He’ll get more money than we can, and look after your interests.’ Once more she had cause for gratitude to Lawson — especially since his own circumstances were increasingly clouded by Bertha’s ill health.21

  Pinker’s representations soon bore fruit. On 30 January 1901 he wrote to Miles, advising that Blackwood had accepted her manuscript for publication, provided certain passages that the publisher thought would prejudice readers were removed or toned down. This would be done in consultation with Mr Lawson. Miles took this in her stride, approving the rate of royalty proposed by Blackwood (the print run is not mentioned), requesting the return of her manuscript when the publisher had done with it, and firmly expressing her concerns. These were that the question mark after ‘Brilliant’ in the title be retained, that the word ‘Miss’ on no account be used, as she did not wish to be known as a young girl but rather ‘a bald-headed seer of the sterner sex’, and that any ‘toning down’ would be very much against her principles. In language steeped in the nineteenth-century radical tradition she declared that her story had been written in the teeth of people’s prejudices and did not look at life ‘through the spectacles of orthodox cant-ists’; but if there were really unpublishable passages, of course they would have to go. What might they be, she wondered.22

  By the end of February the novel had been typeset and pages sent to Pinker, with passages marked for revision by Lawson, who had undertaken to see the work through the press. Apologising for the time it took, Lawson wrote to Blackwood in early April that he and his friend Dubbo-born Arthur Maquarie had been through the story together ‘and made it as perfect as possible’. Although there were numerous corrections, ‘I can assure you every one is necessary,’ he noted. He still felt it was a brilliant piece of work, and that it would be a hit, especially in Australia. Blackwood was pleased with their efforts, and wrote back advising that the proofs had been returned to the printer and that, as requested, the revised version would be returned ‘very shortly’.23

  A few days later, Pinker wrote to tell Miles that her book was in press and informing her of an agreement between Blackwood, Lawson and himself that certain pages had to be omitted; but he assured her nothing ‘essential to [her] effect’ had been lost. Lawson later recalled that Blackwood had given him more latitude than Robertson would have, which presumably meant that whereas as a businessman Robertson preferred ‘a happy sentimentality’ in fiction, what troubled Blackwood, a man of sound Tory stock who ran a successful empire-wide publishing company, was anti-imperial attitudes. Arthur Maquarie, who apparently had done most of the editing, recalled Miles as ‘the little firebrand’.24

  The cover of the first edition of My Brilliant Career (1901). (Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Miles Franklin Printed Book Colleciton, No. 156)

  Miles Franklin was quite unprepared for the shock of seeing her work in print. My Brilliant Career appeared in London on 8 July 1901, and the customary six author’s copies were forwarded to Miles by Pinker the next day. Evidently the news had reached rural Australia by late August, when a relative, Edgar Vernon, wrote to Miles wanting a copy (and hoping she didn’t recall meeting him in Sydney, as he feared he would otherwise appear as ‘a comical character’: he’d heard ‘the trib
e is fairly sprinkled’). The copy Miles Franklin gave her mother, with the rather self-conscious inscription ‘To Mrs J. M. Franklin with best love and respectful compts. From the scribbler,’ is dated 3 September 1901. She also sent copies to Linda at Talbingo, to Hebblewhite, to the Bulletin’s editor J. F. Archibald and, at his request, to ‘Red Page’ editor A. G. Stephens. Ten days later copies were available from Foxall’s in Goulburn, price 3s 6d cloth, 2s 6d paper.25

  It must have been a relief that her immediate family approved. No word of reproach has ever been noted from Miles’s parents, and when Linda received her copy at Talbingo she was delighted and reported ‘there was great excitement in the camp’. ‘I am so proud to be the sister of an authoress,’ she wrote, recounting also that Grandma Lampe had found it all very amusing and took a businesslike approach to those who wanted to borrow the book — ‘“Let ’em buy it,” she says.’ As well, she wonders if ‘The Lordly Phillip’, presumably Phillip Wilkinson, brother of the young man Miles is thought to have fallen in love with at Talbingo in 1896, would recognise himself ‘partly in it’. Maggie Bridle, Susannah Franklin’s cousin, wrote with congratulations, asking where she could obtain a copy. And then came Aunt Metta’s warm response, approving that Stella had dropped a few of her given names.26