The name Miles Franklin will be familiar to anyone with even a passing interest in Australian literary culture. When the writer died in 1954 she bequeathed funds to create a literary award to be made annually to the author of a novel “which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases.” Controversial at times, the Miles Franklin is still the most glittering prize in Australian letters.
Biographies are ineligible for the award. Fair enough, yes? A biography is not a work of fiction. Yet anyone who has tried writing biography, or thought about biography as form, will know that a biography (or an autobiography) is only ever a representation, or a re-performance, of a life, not the life as it was lived. If there are gaps and silences in the life of the subject, or if the subject has left a deliberate trail of evasion or deception, or if the story has become confused by many previous biographies, the biographer must manage as best they might. Those are the challenges.
There is an extensive literature (here’s a recent Australian example) on how infinitely changeable, malleable and fluid biography is, drawing as it does on literary, historical and journalistic traditions. In 1994, American journalist Janet Malcolm asserted in her book about the “afterlife” of Sylvia Plath that the entire biographical enterprise is little more than an exercise in “voyeurism and busybodyism.” Yet even she kept writing biographically for years after that.
Miles Franklin is a tempting biographical subject, even though she has already been “done” by Jill Roe in her 700-page biography, published in 2008. Franklin wrote versions of herself many times in her novels, beginning in 1901 with her most famous work, My Brilliant Career. The twenty-one-year-old author had insisted on a question mark in the title — “My Brilliant (?) Career” — and was annoyed when her publisher took it out. But the irony is too deeply embedded in the story for anyone to miss. The rags-to-riches-to-rags tale led many early readers to conclude that Sybylla Melvyn, the heroine, was one and the same as Miles Franklin, the author.
Something else to attract a Franklin biographer are her extensive papers at the State Library of New South Wales, and this is where Kerrie Davies, a media academic and former journalist, found inspiration for her new book Miles Franklin Undercover: The Little-Known Years When She Created Her Own Brilliant Career.
In an author’s note Davies tells us that she was especially drawn to two brown leather-bound volumes titled “When I Was Mary Anne, a Slavey,” which are a record of a year in 1903–04 when Franklin went “undercover” as a domestic servant in Sydney and Melbourne. (“Mary Anne” was a common term for any female servant.) Franklin hoped to publish a book from her experiences and thus prevent her literary career from, in her words, going “bung.” Angus & Robertson knocked back the book partly because it was relatively easy to identify Franklin’s employers and George Robertson feared they would sue. The Mary Anne manuscript languished.
At first Davies hoped to edit it for publication, but then she realised that what she had in front of her, which may not have been the fair copy submitted to the publisher, was too messy and ill-formed to craft into a single narrative. Moreover it is replete with social attitudes, to “sex workers, tradies and First Nations Australians,” as Davies’ puts it, that are “jarringly” of their time. A scholarly editor would deal with this in additional contextual commentary, but Davies decided to go in a different direction.
Her book is a “slice-of-life” biography (her term) covering the years from 1901 to 1915. Davies wants this critical part of Franklin’s life to “fully breathe” in her book, and it does. In chapter one we discover Miles at home on the family property at Stillwater, near Goulburn, walking out in the baking heat to the kerosene tin nailed to a fence that serves as a letterbox to collect a parcel covered in English stamps. Revealed: her six copies of My Brilliant Career, just published.
Each postal run, the Franklin mail tin is “stuffed from end to end” with letters from readers. This post-publication experience is beautifully evoked, because for all her boundless energy and ambition Franklin was a very young woman with only an average education, living in rural poverty, and nothing could have prepared her for overnight literary acclaim, or the incomprehension and anger from members of her family and community at how they had been used as characters in Franklin’s book (or so they believed).
With the failure of the Mary Anne project, Franklin packs that and several other rejected manuscripts and heads overseas. We accompany her to San Francisco (she arrives a fortnight after the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906) and Chicago, where we witness her mixed fortunes as she struggles to make a living while establishing herself among feminist networks. She continues to disappoint her family with her determined rejection of matrimony. (“Have you found anyone you like better than yourself?” her grandmother once asked her.) She never stops writing.
The end of the “slice” is Franklin’s decision in 1915 to leave Chicago for London, a city which for her is the “ultimate test of fame for any writer.” Readers are left to wonder if she is to make a success of it, but we have watched her confront and overcome many disappointments and have reason to hope that the self-knowledge, determination and resilience she has gained will carry her through.
Like a character in a Künstlerroman — a novel based around a female writer’s development into a mature artist — Miles Franklin has grown and changed in these fourteen years. The book’s narrative arc traces her early success, her subsequent struggle with rejection and tragedy, and her triumph as “a single woman embarking on a life that few women of her era contemplated alone.”
Davies tells us explicitly that her book is not a work of fiction, although, she adds, “it might read as such.” We should think of it as “a literary lacework of Edwardian sources, stitched together to create Miles’ life and her world.” She eschews the “dispassionate” voice of a historian and biographer, turning instead to creative non-fiction to show how Franklin defied the status quo for Edwardian women.
Let’s consider the lace metaphor. Historical research involves identifying and analysing the available sources and deciding what to do with the inevitable gaps and absences. So there are stitches — the historical sources — and there are holes. Lace design is all about arranging the holes into a pleasing pattern, and this is what Davies has done. At the back of her book she thoroughly documents, chapter by chapter, every source she has used to create her narrative, thereby showing us not just the final piece of lacey fabric but the pattern instructions as well.
Enormous skill and patience went into crafting the narrative out of a wide range of material including Franklin’s published and unpublished fiction and journalism, letters, diaries, contemporary newspapers and magazines, and secondary sources. Jill Roe’s book acts as Davies’s “map” through all this. At a few points Davies acknowledges that she is speculating.
Does the book look like a biography? With its sixteen pages of glossy photographs and fifty-six pages of references and bibliography, yes it does. But only occasionally does the narrative voice of an omniscient biographer step up to explain things and impart information to the reader. Indeed, significant creative license is sometimes deployed, as here, for example, during a moment in Chicago in 1907:
The warmth of the summer was beckoning. On the ride home from work in the city’s streetcars she squeezes among burly men and tired women. She wrinkles her nose at their tobacco breathe. The days are longer now, her chest does not hurt from seasonal flu, and she can walk along the lake without shivering.
This is from a five-page chapter referenced with nineteen citations, but there is no citation for the passage just quoted, and it is not noted as speculation. It must therefore be a “hole” among the stitches that the author has filled with her imagination.
Does the book read like fiction? Most certainly. The physical scene-setting is absorbing and satisfying, though I found the narrative flat and the emotional register narrow. Miles goes here, she goes there, she meets Banjo Paterson one day and Rose Scott another day, she receives a letter from her sister, she sends a postcard to her mother. And so on. There is plenty of action, and many characters: Miles herself, of course, and her circle, and some vaguely evoked historical personages who drift about like extras in a film. But seldom do I feel moved by the characters, or curious about them.
Often there is a sense that something momentous is about to happen, that the piled-on period detail and the comings and goings of various characters are leading somewhere. But then they don’t. The rejection of the Mary Anne manuscript must have been a crisis for Franklin after a year of wearisome labour (in which she was burned when a faulty gas stove ignited in her face) and the disapproval of her family. But Davies deals with Franklin’s reaction to the news in just a single paragraph. Miles sulks and curls up, dejected, in her room. Without further ado the reader is bustled on to the next thing.
The death of her sister Linda in 1907 was one of the few times in the book when Miles stood out to me not just as an active person but also as a feeling person. In her grief she became seriously depressed and unwell, and at last I caught a glimpse into Miles Franklin’s heart. Linda, unlike Miles, had done everything expected of a loving sister, daughter, wife and mother. And yet she died. This tragedy reached out from the past and touched something in me as a reader in the present.
From the safety of the archive Davies makes little dashes into the unknown because she badly wants to enter the consciousness of her characters. But with her self-imposed adherence to history, she cannot quite grant herself the freedom that a novelist would take as their due.
By the end of the book I was certainly convinced that Miles Franklin was an extraordinary woman. But then, I knew that already. •
Miles Franklin Undercover: The Little-Known Years When She Created Her Own Brilliant Career
By Kerrie Davies | Allen & Unwin | $34.95 | 384 pages
