The Very Secretive and Passionate Stella Miles Franklin
Reading a brief summary of the tumultuous life of the Australian writer Stella Miles Franklin makes one wonder how she felt when living through those many twists and turns, from her birth into an impoverished farmer’s family in the bush in 1879 to becoming a literary sensation in 1901 with My Brilliant Career, a path-breaking novel about a young woman in Australia. Shortly thereafter Miles, as she prefers, heads to Chicago, working with the feminist Women’s Trade Union League, then to England, where she works as a housemaid in order to write about how badly they’re treated. From there, Miles enlists in the Scottish Women’s Hospitals, serving the Serbian Army in Macedonian Greece; then back to London, returning to Australia in 1932, where she publishes a series of historical novels under a pseudonym, beginning with her descent from an English convict. What kind of woman lived such a life, and how did she feel thorough all those dramatic changes?
Alexandra Lapierre tells us, aided in large part by the bounty Miles Franklin bequeathed to the State Library of New South Wales on her death in 1954: unpublished writings, letters, and private diaries. This novel gets inside Miles’s head: her deep conflicts over love and sex, her commitments to social justice and feminist causes, and her inner strife and her confusion about what best to do with her life. The novel quotes directly from Miles’s diaries and fills in the surrounding stories. The result is not only the compelling story of a remarkable, rebellious woman who brought Australian literature into the mainstream (and established two prizes for Australian writers), but makes a significant contribution to literary history, including bibliographies, photographs, and useful notes. Originally written in French, this translation beautifully captures the secrets and passions of a rare woman.
