Miles Franklin

by Jill Roe

  Even before Miles received her author’s copies her name was made on the wider stage, with ten or more favourable reviews appearing in the British metropolitan and regional press in July–August 1901. The British reviewers recognised the youthful promise of the book, praising its vitality and innocent audacity, while identifying some problems. Four days after J. B. Pinker despatched the six author’s copies to Miles, a first brief notice in the London Academy saw it as a story of ‘sheep-farming in the solitudes’, and in acclaiming the author as the ‘[Russian diarist] Marie Bashkirtseff of the Bush’. But it was the Glasgow Herald that first linked Miles Franklin with the Brontës — ‘This girl writes as the author of Jane Eyre wrote — out of heart, with a hatred of shams.’ The Glaswegian reviewer was taken aback, however, by the amount of slang, evidently used unawares. The most critical response came from the Spectator (interestingly, published by Blackwood): this was a girl’s book, often slipshod and excessively egotistical, but written with passion and power. It concludes: ‘Her style wants chastening and she should renounce once for all the pose of a defiant woman who attracts all men and sends all men away.’ The London Times reviewer was incredulous that a girl in Sybylla’s circumstances could turn her back on wealth and happiness.27

  Around Thornford the reaction was mixed. One admirer from Currawang took great pleasure in the novel, and expected the characters would recognise themselves; the writer couldn’t place the hapless English jackeroo, Hawden, but claimed to have no trouble with Harold Beecham. Charlie Graham, an early admirer of Miles, confessed he was jealous of the book.28

  The main hostile response came from ‘Dear Uncle’ — George Franklin — who wrote that it was all malicious lies, and criticised her parents. To this Miles replied in a dignified tone that it was simply a story of Australian life and she did not mean any of the characters as real; that he and his wife had been good to her; and that others thought she had portrayed families ‘down here’. Later, some younger men expressed reservations: Herbert Wilkinson, the cousin from ‘Yallowin’ Miles is thought to have fallen for, felt he had been treated unfairly but tried to rise above it, and Edward Bridle, another of her mother’s cousins, told Linda he didn’t like the book. Otherwise, it seems negative reactions were mostly expressed verbally.29

  However, the Goulburn Penny Post, previously edited by Miles’s mentor Hebblewhite, and since 1900 by Henry Pinn, reproduced a paragraph from Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, introduced by the observation that ‘a young lady resident at Bangalore has written a novel’. The paragraph highlighted Henry Lawson’s preface (which, as has often been pointed out, said straight out that the story had been written ‘by a girl’, despite her wishes and her leaving her own preface unsigned). The remainder of the notice offered a grudging response to the book itself. Fidelity to local colour was conceded and an amateurish construction could be set aside, but apart from realism in presenting ‘the hard facts of Australian life’, the interest ‘is not strong’.30

  Later, a more substantial review appeared in the Penny Post. The review, by ‘Heather’, was for the most part patronising and negative. While commending a young girl’s realism about the bush, ‘Heather’ found ‘a cynical view of life’, and asked rhetorically if it was good taste to depict one’s parents in such an unpleasant light. The likelihood of a man in possession of 200,000 acres (81,000 hectares) giving it up for dairy farming is derided. So is the inconsistency of Sybylla’s preaching against the subjection of women while rejecting Harold Beecham as too weak, which might also lead overseas damsels to imagine that rich bachelors hung off bushes in New South Wales. Likewise, the bishop responsible for the repossession of the Melvyn household goods is defended as only a nominal figure. The most distasteful aspect for ‘Heather’, however, was the book’s depiction of local class relations, especially a lamentable ignorance of the ways of people of culture and refinement, and the absurd prediction about ‘the iron hand of class distinctions’, whereas in reality people with brains could rise easily in Australia. Perhaps, it is opined, Miss Franklin, who does have brains, will yet find herself ‘an honoured guest at Government House’.31

  Three weeks after the Daily Telegraph’s grudging paragraph, another appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald. No doubt Miles could have done without it. While asserting that My Brilliant Career was a creditable novel by a young Australian girl, it found the heroine, though moral, ‘distinctly unpleasant’; ‘not a person whose acquaintance in the flesh it would be desirable to make’. This was not a correct representation of the Australian girl, asserted the Herald. ‘It would be a matter for regret if she — “Sybylla Melvyn” is her name — could possibly be taken as a type of Australian bush girl. Bold, forward, and selfish, Sybylla is the sort of girl that is happily rare in Australia.’32

  How wrong contemporaries can be. Miles Franklin’s generation had good reason to be uneasy about marriage, and it was that 1890s generation that created the modern image of the Australian girl, a big step from previous crude imitations of English ladies. Between 1890 and 1910, hardly a year went by without a book or two written by and about this new Australian girl; for example, Catherine Martin’s An Australian Girl and A Little Bush Maid by Mary Grant Bruce.33

  It seems the Bulletin was the only other Sydney publication to notice My Brilliant Career when it came out. On 28 September A. G. Stephens filled the Bulletin’s ‘Red Page’ with a resoundingly positive review of lasting value, highlighting the authentic voice of an Australian girl in ‘a book full of sunlight’, and pronouncing that this was ‘the very first Australian novel to be published’. When she read it, Miles recalled in a letter in 1902 that she felt she could hug the Bulletin: ‘Tho’ it did not rear me I always call myself a near relative and am glad it did not deny me as one of its youngsters.’ But, she protested, ‘My Brilliant Career is not the story of my own life.’34

  Henry Hyde Champion’s Melbourne monthly, the Book Lover, also noticed My Brilliant Career in September. Soon after, Champion’s friend F. W. (Fred) Maudsley was in touch with Miles on Champion’s behalf, promising a full review in the November issue. In the review, Champion reiterated Stephens’ view that this was ‘the most thoroughly Australian novel’ yet to appear. Like the Age later that month, Champion assumed the book to be autobiographical — ‘she tells us so in an introduction’ — and the first Australian comparison with the journals of Marie Bashkirtseff appeared in print.35

  In the December Book Lover a photograph of the author appeared on the front page, and there was a positive comment by the renowned children’s author Ethel M. Turner inside (‘the most convincing “local colour” that has been arrived at in any Australian book’). However, while the book probably did reach ‘a fairly large public’ through the Book Lover’s Library, run by Champion’s wife, Elsie Belle Champion (the sister of Vida Goldstein), such enthusiasm did not necessarily translate into sales. Miles had already complained to Pinker that copies were slow to reach Australia, and did not arrive in any quantity until early 1902, according to the Champions. In August, Elsie Belle reported that ‘My Brilliant Career is still selling well for us’, and that copies were to be seen in other city bookshops, but it was probably the case that Melbourne paid more attention when Miles herself turned up in 1904.36

  As time went by, responses became increasingly diverse, as they usually do. A difference of opinion between town and country emerged, exemplified by the opposing views of the Stock and Station Journal and the Worker, the former responsive to the plight of suffering country people and the latter thoroughly hostile at what it saw as rural self-indulgence. (Miles Franklin marked this as the only dissident review, which suggests she had repressed the Penny Post review and never saw the Adelaide Critic, where ‘Iris’ objected to a naive ‘howl of discontent’ and the ‘adulation of Lawson’.)37

  In due course new approaches also surfaced. In ‘Fiction in the Australian Bush’, a review article published in the Paris-based Weekly Critical Review on 17 September 1903, the eminent Brit
ish sexologist Havelock Ellis noted that My Brilliant Career was ‘a vivid and sincere book’, of psychological interest but painfully crude, too crude to impress as literature. Six weeks later, a résumé of Ellis’s comments appeared on the Bulletin’s ‘Red Page’, the bailiwick of A. G. Stephens, who was alert to the new sexology. A few months earlier he had written to Miles about Sybylla’s satisfaction at the bruises inflicted on her person by Hal (‘Hal, we are quits’): ‘Do you mean that you or another woman likes to be hurt and bruised by the man she loves?’ This was a very interesting question, scientifically, he added, a point elaborated subsequently by Ellis in his Studies in the Psychology of Sex, in which he cites the bruises scene as evidence of a positive relationship between love and pain experienced by women during courtship.38

  To this inquiry Miles made no reply. If My Brilliant Career carried the Australian novel into new territory, now recognisable as the psychology of desire, she had not intended it, and it is not until after World War I that she mentions Ellis’s work, in a 1918 book review. In 1920 she told her friend Alice Henry how she had saved a copy of his Man and Woman from disposal and sent it home for her library as a classic, albeit an outdated one: ‘Fancy we went through a phase of reading him,’ she wrote. Nonetheless, it is evident that the new perspective was embarrassing and irritating. ‘I always did resist Havelock Ellis’s findings,’ she recalled decades later.39

  My Brilliant Career is an angry book, and well-brought-up young women were still not supposed to express anger. It is also a wonderfully rebellious book, and it came down on the side of the poor and the oppressed. At that time the ‘wretched of the earth’ were understood to be the failing ‘cocky farmers’ who had been granted land rights from the squatters in the 1860s only to be defeated by depression and drought in the 1890s; Miles Franklin was firmly on their side. Sybylla Melvyn declines to marry into the squattocracy; she ridicules Empire types like Frank Hawden, and she puts her faith in land taxes, not God. In declining to marry, itself a radical position at that time, she defied respectability and right thinking. Although ‘only a girl’, she concludes that she is proud to be ‘a daughter of the mighty bush’, close to the people and part of the new nation.

  While psychology and gender have since become the main issues in discussion of My Brilliant Career, for contemporaries they were autobiography and class.40 For example, the scene where Sybylla strikes Hal with a riding whip when he tries to kiss her provides a formal link with anti-slavery literature. Even so, there is a down-to-earth aspect to it too. The whip was near to hand, and whips were something Miles had grown up with. In Childhood at Brindabella she recalls that handling a whip as a small child had given her great satisfaction; and as a young woman she was the proud owner of two, gifts from admiring stockmen. When her book arrived with a whip-cracking girl rider on the hardcover, she was delighted. In a recently located letter to William Blackwood dated 3 March 1902 she wrote: ‘I feel impelled to express my pleasure in the binding of my story . . . The stockwhip especially takes the fancy.’41

  So what did contemporary readers think? Letters came from all over Australia. Some were simply addressed to ‘Sybylla Melvyn, Possum Gully, near Goulburn’. All were moved by her achievement and felt impelled to communicate. Writing in March 1902, M. J. Purcell of Transfield Park, Melbourne, thought My Brilliant Career second only to Robbery Under Arms for Australian life, and approved its ending; too many books, he thought, were spoiled by happy endings.42

  About half of the surviving letters are from women, many of them under thirty and mostly single, and all eager to commend Miles Franklin and her book for its fidelity to Australia and their own lives. Pearl Wilson of Jenolan Caves thought it ‘the very best Australian tale I have ever read’. Mary Dunster, a dairy farmer’s daughter of Singleton, New South Wales, wrote that she had had the same experiences, though not so bad, as her father was more successful. Stella Simpson of St Kilda, Melbourne, wrote: ‘I am an Australian girl like yourself & I have had the same longings & I think exactly the same things as you do, and how I have revolted against being a girl.’43

  Whereas most of the men to respond were well-known literary figures or family associates, the women readers, with a few exceptions, were unknowns and remain so. Among younger women, Agnes Brewster, later founding principal of Hornsby Girls’ High School, and the thirteen-year-old Molly David, daughter of Professor Edgeworth David of Sydney University and his wife, Cara, wrote to Miles. However, the letters mostly came from women in lower class positions on the land or in unspecified city jobs; and they instantly recognised themselves in My Brilliant Career.44

  This was more or less as A. G. Stephens expected: ‘All over this country, brooding on squatters’ verandahs or mooning in selectors’ huts, there are scattered here and there hundreds of lively, dreamy Australian girls whose queer, uncomprehended ambitions are the despair of the household. They yearn, they aspire for what they know not.’45

  Miles Franklin was astonished at this outpouring. She sometimes complained that every unhappy girl in Australia wrote to her after My Brilliant Career came out. They confessed their miseries, asked for a biography of Miles or a photo, invited her to visit them. Some wanted her help with their own writing. Others wanted to help her. Narrandera squatter’s daughter Struan Robertson couldn’t, as she had nothing of her own, not even a dress allowance. A few, notably Edith Twynam of ‘Riversdale’, North Goulburn, one of the daughters of retired New South Wales Surveyor-General Edward Twynam, both asked for and offered help. Nothing came of Miss Twynam’s suggestion that they might collaborate, and her own literary efforts have not so far been traced. For the most part, however, in an era of rampant masculinism, the overlooked Australian girl appreciated the attention: ‘you have made the Australian girl appear from behind her gum-trees’. Women writers of the next generation, Katharine Susannah Prichard, for example, certainly took heart, and well into the twentieth century there were still dreamy girls on squatters’ verandahs — most notably the poet Judith Wright, stuck on the family property in New England.46

  My Brilliant Career made Miles Franklin’s name, but not her fortune. Envious locals thought she must now be rich, to which Linda snorted that she should be. By August, Miles was waiting impatiently for her first royalty cheque, and by year’s end she seemed ready to give up on writing as insufficiently remunerative. Her records indicate that the book sold 1399 copies in 1901, 1012 of them in the cheaper colonial edition, which received a lower rate of royalties, and a similar number in 1902 (1134). By December 1903 fewer than 500 additional copies (449) had been sold; and although the novel went into its sixth impression in 1904, as late as 1938 Blackwood still had a few copies in stock. And when the first royalty cheque arrived in 1902 it was not very encouraging, amounting to £16 5s 6d, about what Miles might have earned as an unskilled hand in the clothing trade for the year. By December 1904 the author had received a total of £27 8s 10d in royalties for her work, a meagre amount even for a young working woman of the time.47

  Miles never made much, either from her books or from paid employment, at least until the interwar years. Single women were able to make do on very little in those days. Miles was mostly sustained by a feminist network, beginning with her mother. She was encouraged by the critical reception of her book. Apparently the family supported her. They certainly knew about a next book, and both Linda and Charlie Graham, who had by now focused his affections on Linda, worried that she was working too hard on it. Linda at Talbingo urged her to come to the Tumut Show on 26–27 January 1902: ‘Let your book go for a while & have a change, it will do you good,’ she wrote.48

  The work referred to is surely ‘On the Outside Track’. Miles was anxious about her contracts, and whether she could also publish her work in Australia. Then, on 16 February 1902, one of the admiring readers mentioned earlier, Edith Twynam, wrote to say she was sorry to hear Miles had had unsatisfactory reports of her book, adding that ‘Mr Patterson’ was a friend of her sister Mrs Wesche in Sydney. Th
e upshot was that Phoebe Wesche spoke to ‘Banjo’ Paterson, a solicitor as well as a poet, and on 25 March, in reply to a note from Miles, Paterson said he would be happy to advise her on contractual matters, free of charge. A week later he wrote again, urging her to come to Sydney soon, otherwise she might miss him. The exchange marks the onset of an emotional relationship, which in a subterranean way dominated 1902.49

  Another important letter from Sydney arrived at ‘Stillwater’ soon after. Rose Scott, suffragist and doyenne of the Sydney liberal establishment, had just read My Brilliant Career, and was keen to meet the author. Would Miles Franklin be visiting? Were there books she would like sent? Could they be friends? The great Rose, who had campaigned for women’s suffrage in Goulburn in 1901, was really taken with the young writer: ‘Let me, my dear fellow Australian, my dear fellow woman, serve you in any way I can.’ Soon she was recommending poems by ‘Mrs Stetson’ (Charlotte Perkins Gilman) and the works of transcendentalist Ralph Emerson, both leading American intellectuals of the mid- and late-Victorian period. So began a life-enhancing relationship, which expanded Miles Franklin’s horizons and brought her nearer to the world. Amid the excitement, no one seems to have noticed the death of Charles Auchinvole Blyth at the Coast Hospital on 1 April 1902.50

  By the second week of April, Miles was in Sydney. On Monday 7 April Paterson wrote in his flowing hand from the Australian Club inviting her to lunch the following Wednesday, ‘and you can tell me what you have done re agreements’; he would be waiting at the door and she would easily recognise him, ‘a sad-looking person with a very hard face’. What eventuated is undocumented, but it seems as if the UK contracts were tighter than he had supposed in prior correspondence, where he thought if she had entered into agreements when under twenty-one, she was probably ‘free as air’.51