Miles Franklin
Australian writer and feminist
1879 CE to 1954 CE
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (October 14, 1879 – September 19, 1954), known as Miles Franklin, is an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, published by Blackwoods of Edinburgh in 1901.
While she writes throughout her life, her other major literary success, All That Swagger, is not published until 1936.
She is committed to the development of a uniquely Australian form of literature, and she actively pursues this goal by supporting writers, literary journals, and writers' organizations.
She has had a long-lasting impact on Australian literary life through her endowment of a major annual prize for literature about "Australian Life in any of its phases", the Miles Franklin Award.
Her impact will be further recognized in 2013 with the creation of the Stella Prize, awarded annually for the best work of literature by an Australian woman.
World
Southern Oceania
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Miles Franklin, the nom de plume of Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, portrays an irrepressible teenage girl, Sybylla Melvyn, growing to womanhood in contemporary rural New South Wales in My Brilliant Career, published in 1901, when Franklin is twenty.
Written while she was still a teenager, as a romance to amuse her friends, Franklin had submitted the manuscript to Henry Lawson, who had contributed a preface and taken it to his own publishers in Edinburgh.
The popularity of the novel in Australia and the perceived closeness of many of the characters to her own family and circumstances as small farmers in New South Wales near Goulburn causes Franklin a great deal of distress and leads her to withdrawing the novel from publication until after her death.
Shortly after the publication of My Brilliant Career, Franklin writes a sequel, My Career Goes Bung, which will not be published until 1946.