Miles Franklin: Her Brilliant Career

Plot

This is an intriguing book about a unique woman. Colin Roderick wrote this book to restore Miles Franklin to what she believed to be her rightful place in the Australian story: not so much a feminist as, more significantly, the creator of a new mode in Australian literature. The circumstances of Miles Franklin’s childhood made her a rebel against a male-dominated society, and she maintained a facade of feminism as a refuge against her deepest fears. In middle age, however, she abandoned it in favour of a vicarious exposition of manly virtue. The clash between the masculine and feminine elements of her make-up appears in her choice of mystifying pseudonums.

Colin Roderick was closely associated with Miles Franklin for ten years preceding her death in 1954, and she nominated him, in her will, as one of the original judges of the Miles Franklin Literary Prize. Colin Roderick has suggested that her essential characteristics emerge in the behaviour of the characters she created, and he explores her complex personality in this entertaining study with the advantage of having known Miles Franklin personally.