My sexier, steamier career is exactly what was needed

September 4, 2026 — 12:12pm

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When Stella Miles Franklin’s first novel My Brilliant Career was published in 1901, it had mixed and often patronising reviews from the (mostly male) critics. But the readers who loved it were young Australian girls like herself, growing up on remote homesteads and dreaming of a better life.

Jill Roe’s biography of Franklin quotes from their letters. Pearl Wilson of Jenolan Caves thought it “the very best Australian tale I have ever read”. Stella Simpson of St Kilda, Melbourne, wrote: “I am an Australian girl like yourself and I have had the same longings and I think exactly the same things as you do, and how I have revolted against being a girl.”

No doubt these letters delighted Franklin, who based her novel on her own experiences and her frustrated desire to be a writer. “Oh, how I hate this living death which has swallowed all my teens, which is greedily devouring my youth, which will sap my prime, and in which my old age, if I am cursed with any, will be worn away!” cries Sybylla Melvyn, Franklin’s alter ego.

The little bush girl’s inexorable fate is to be gussied........

© The Sydney Morning Herald