Franklin, Miles

(Australian, 1879–1954)

Franklin's family were pioneers, mountain squatters in New South Wales, and she wrote her famous first novel, My Brilliant Career (1901), at the age of 16. This was inspired by Franklin's own frustration at the tedium and poverty of her family's life in the bush, and takes the heroine to her grandmother's beautiful farm where she is wooed by a rich landowner whom she makes up her mind to reject. Ignore the rather wordy opening and start at chapter 2, as the family moves to Possum Gully. The heroine's independence and passionate determination to make the most of her life are shot through with self-doubt, making her one of the most immediate and engaging of fictional voices; an Australian bush Jane Eyre. Franklin wrote many later novels including the Bin-Bin sequence (1928–56), a saga of Australian pioneering life, and, with the same subject matter, All that Swagger (1936).

Charlotte Brontë, Christina Stead. See AUSTRALIA & NEW ZEALAND  JR