Miles Franklin has been the subject of several new artistic works in the last five years. Her brilliant life still has plenty to tell us about our nation.
How can we explain the recent revival of interest in the work of Australian pioneering feminist Miles Franklin (1879–1954)? One answer is that Franklin’s ideas about politics still matter.
Works like My Brilliant Career provide readers with valuable deliberative drama about the political options that faced the new Australian nation. Netflix’s adaption of My Brilliant Career is the latest, and soon to be released as a mini-series. Many creative artists are attracted by Franklin’s staging of dramatic contests between her spirited heroes and their many conventional opponents. Her characters illustrate competing forms of citizenship that are still worth examination.
This article examines notable artistic works from the past five years that took part of their inspiration from the 1979 film My Brilliant Career, directed by Gillian Armstrong, and based on the screenplay by Eleanor Witcombe, who confessed she had ‘known the author,’ Miles Franklin (Eleanor Witcombe, My Brilliant Career: The Screenplay, University of Queensland Press 1992, p. vii). These recent works echo the praise offered originally by Henry Lawson in his preface to the novel by the ‘little bush girl’ who had written, he said, a book that is ‘true to Australia – the truest I ever read’.
My own interest in Franklin’s work is academic. The recent artistic interest in the original novel possibly reflects growing appreciation of the intellectual qualities of her literary achievement. Franklin, a pioneering Australian feminist and nationalist, was unable to secure an Australian publisher for her first novel, My Brilliant Career. With the help of her mentor Henry Lawson, it was published by Blackwood in Great Britain in 1901. Franklin’s next literary works remained unpublished, illustrating lack of interest from Australian publishers in Franklin’s unconventional feminism.
In 1906, Franklin left Australia to live in Chicago, then London. She did not return permanently until 1932. Her second book was also published by Blackwood in 1909 in Great Britain, even though Some Everyday Folk and Dawn dealt with the achievement of women’s suffrage in New South Wales.
In 1910, Franklin withdrew My Brilliant Career from publication for the rest of her lifetime, requesting in her will that it not be republished until a decade after her death in 1954. She was convinced that Australian audiences had failed to see her first novel as a work of cultural criticism and not, as many suspected, as a sour-tempered autobiography. The good news now is that Franklin’s own withdrawal of My Brilliant Career has been replaced with widespread artistic support for the deeper cultural preoccupations shaping her literary achievement.
One of the most graceful of recent renditions of My Brilliant Career is the ABC ‘Timeless Audiobook’ version released in November 2025, with Gemma Chua-Tran reading the full set of 38 chapters, as well as Lawson’s fitting preface. Gemma Chua-Tran reads the text with astute authority, including the daunting introduction written by Franklin to represent the voice of the novel’s colourful narrator, Sybylla Melvyn, whose name is withheld for several chapters. In the last chapter, Chua-Tran conveys Sybylla’s rueful weariness about never really escaping from being ‘an Australian’ and ‘a peasant’ and ‘enslaved’ and a ‘bush commoner’ and ‘only a…woman’.
A celebrated recent reworking of My Brilliant Career is the musical performed by the Melbourne Theatre Company, now appearing in Sydney at the Roslyn Packer Theatre. This was developed at Monash University through the Jeanne Pratt Artist-in-Residency program. The star of the show is the actor who performs (speaking, singing, dancing, piano playing) as Sybylla Melvyn: Kala Gare. The musical picks out a range of highlights from Franklin’s quite lengthy novel, focusing on a sympathetic portrait of the would-be writer Sybylla and her feisty challenge to convention.
The text for the musical is by actor and writer Sheridan Harbridge and writer-director Dean Bryant, with songs composed by Mathew Frank to Bryant’s lyrics. The director was Anne-Louise Sarks, chief executive of the Melbourne Theatre Company. The cast of ten actors take turns as stage musicians and singers, while also participating as actors and dancers. Victoria Falconer’s musical arrangements elevate the drama into a celebration of what Franklin originally hoped her novel might become: a defence of artistic excellence against social mediocrity.
Australian writers’ festivals have recently featured French author Alexandra Lapierre and her novel The Very Secretive and Passionate Stella Miles Franklin (Europa Editions, 2026). Lapierre is French by birth, educated in the United States, and an experienced novelist and biographer. Her 460-page novel about Miles Franklin also has a set of appendices. These reflect the author’s four years of considerable research and include four pages listing many of Franklin’s journalistic and unpublished writings, as well as ten pages of critical scholarship, rarely known to many of Franklin’s readers. There are also 16 pages of black-and-white photographs.
Lapierre’s book is a novelist’s reconstruction of Franklin’s life, complete with quite detailed observations of Franklin’s mental attitude to those close enough either to irritate or enthuse her. Franklin’s awkward life with her family and her few friends after the 1901 publication of My Brilliant Career is covered in the first 60 pages. The period leading to her departure for a decade in Chicago occupies another 130 pages, with very colourful attention paid to her lover ‘Banjo’ Paterson, astute insights into the supportive roles of new feminist friends Rose Scott and Vida Goldstein, but no recognition of the mentoring role of Franklin’s favourite fellow writer, Joseph Furphy – about whom Franklin wrote a major book in 1944. So the novel proceeds, providing readers with an imaginative reconstruction of Franklin’s life in and out of Australia, graced by Lapierre’s gifts as an inventive storyteller.
Novelists like Lapierre can compel our interest with their remakings of personal history. There are three other examples of novelistic reconstruction of Miles Franklin, but before we look at them, we should note the fascinating historical research in Jacqueline Kent’s Inconvenient Women: Australian Radical Writers 1900-1970 (Newsouth 2025). A striking photo of Franklin in 1901 appears on the cover of Kent’s book, suggesting that the author of My Brilliant Career is at the forefront of the literary movement examined by Kent – in part because of Franklin’s establishment of the Miles Franklin Award, created posthumously after her death in 1954.
Kerrie Davies’s Miles Franklin Undercover: The Little Known Years When She Created Her Own Brilliant Career (Allen and Unwin 2025) is a good example of what a writer can do to bring personal history alive through a novelistic or ‘speculative’ account of Franklin’s unpublished work as an investigative journalist a year or so after My Brilliant Career came out. Davies’ book is not intended to read as fiction; it is an evidence-based representation of one of Franklin’s own completed but unpublished books reporting, bottom-up as it were, on her work as a household servant in Melbourne and Sydney. The primary source is available in the Mitchell Library, unread by any but a few of Franklin’s keenest fans. Davies has transformed that draft work into a self-portrait of Franklin in the decade after publication of My Brilliant Career. This work has the voice of Franklin and the stage-management of Davies. It is very readable and is reinforced with 50 pages of notes on sources and 16 pages of black and white photographs. Readers also learn much about the busy but artistically unproductive life Franklin lived in Chicago.
Amy Brown’s My Brilliant Sister (Scribner 2024) is a novel about Franklin’s younger sister Linda. The book reflects the author’s gifts as a poet, imagining letters written between the two Franklin sisters. The second part is a narration by Linda that records her view of living with Stella during the composition of My Brilliant Career. In the third part, ‘Stella’, each sub-section repeats the titles used in the sub-sections in part one, ‘Ida’, which is about a current teacher trying to teach My Brilliant Career. The central part is ‘Stillwater’ which begins with a quotation from My Brilliant Career attributed to Miles Franklin, who of course wrote these as the thoughts of her narrator Sybylla. The novel’s cover page leads with the question: what’s the cost of a brilliant career? This question nicely matches Franklin’s preferred title of My Brilliant (?) Career. Brown constructs a pathway for readers to reflect anew on how sisterly relationships might have fared, given the puzzling impact Franklin’s novel had on her own family.
Salonika Burning by novelist Gail Jones (Text 2023) is the last artistic work reimagining Franklin’s many careers. Franklin left Chicago at the start of the Great War hoping she could do something useful to help the Allied forces. She served as an orderly in the Scottish Women’s Hospital near Salonika in Macedonia for six months in 1917. Franklin wrote quite extensively about her experiences in unpublished papers located in the Mitchell Library. Part of her writing was published in 2014 – a centenary after the beginning of the First World War. Jones lists this publication but is clear that her own work is ‘not intended to be read as history’. A character called Stella is one of four characters Jones examines. Each appears in turn, with Stella suffering miserable fevers amid the fear of enemy attack. Jones’ strength is her revelation of Stella’s inner anxiety as a volunteer striving to help care for military casualties.
Two final works deserve brief note. First, the play My Brilliant Career written by Kendall Feaver (Currency Press 2021). Feaver’s new version of My Brilliant Career drew on many of Franklin’s later writings, which often try to fill the gaps left by Franklin’s cessation of further publication of her first, misunderstood novel. The play was performed by Belvoir in 2021.
Second is the work which has had such a large impact on all the works noted above. I refer to the very influential script by Eleanor Wicombe: My Brilliant Career: The Screenplay (University of Queensland Press, 1992). Witcombe admits that her screenplay is more a ‘mutation’ than a ‘transposition’ of Franklin’s novel. The script tries to bring to life the animating spirit relied on by Franklin. That spirit has also been captured in various ways by each of the writers noted in this article, all of whom acknowledge Franklin as a master dramatist of political identity.
My own book examining many of Franklin’s literary works, Promoting Postcolonial Australia: New Readings of Miles Franklin and Joseph Furphy, Bloomsbury Academic, New York, is due out in August 2026.
John Uhr
Emeritus Professor Uhr works in the School of Politics and International Relations, Research School of Social Sciences, ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences at ANU. His research interests include Australian politics, political and governmental ethics, parliament, public leadership and democratic theory and practice.