"Not Even a Wrong Number"

Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin

This article was originally published, in slightly different form, in Mathilde magazine in August, 2023. You can find them and their excellent print-only journal here.

Picnic Party at Winstead Creek, Stanthorpe, QLD c. 1909, National Library of Australia

On the 12^th of June 1949, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin wrote in her diary:

“Totally alone all day—not even a wrong number on the telephone to break my solitary confinement.”

The rest of the winter is similarly grim.

“25 June 1949: Solitary confinement as usual, not even a wrong number.

17 July 1949: Usual solitary confinement

7 August 1949: It is so desolate to be alone on Sunday—all dead & gone but me.”

In early 1950 she agonises about her literary legacy.

Feeling terribly discouraged & as if I had better give it all up and die! I’ve struggled for so long for nothing—long enough to prove over & over again that I have no talent for writing. Could have made a success & helped my family had I set to something else. There’s not a soul alive to whom I’m of any consequence, none to care a pin how soon I die.

The rest of her diary continues in this vein: loneliness, doubt, depression and lethargy until her death in 1954. There is something immediately contemporary about Franklin’s diary in this period. The “loneliness epidemic” accelerates as marriage and other community-forming institutions decline. Anyone who has worked in a call-centre doing surveys knows that a significant number of respondents are clearly happy to talk to anyone about anything. Rates of childlessness and singleness continue to grow, in Australia and around the world.

There is also something old-fashioned about Franklin’s attitude to her condition, an admirable stoicism often absent from contemporary feminism. She laments but doesn’t whine. Indeed, nothing like the diary entries just quoted appear in her published writing. While she sometimes complains about the people around her, she blames no one. For it was something she freely chose. She knew loneliness is the price of true independence, not so much a particular male or female loneliness, but an artists’, and it began early, not in literal solitude but in intellectual isolation. In My Brilliant Career through the voice of her barely disguised avatar Sybylla Melvyn, she writes:

The pleasure, so exquisite as to be almost pain, which I derived from books, and especially the Australian poets, is beyond description…The weird witchery of mighty bush, the breath of wide sunlit plains, the sound of camp-bells and jingle of hobble chains, floating on the soft twilight breezes, had come to these men and had written a tale on their hearts as had been written on mine…The wind and the rain had a voice which spoke to [Henry] Kendall, and he too had endured the misery of lack of companionship.

It’s hard from our vantage point to appreciate just how unusual Franklin was in eschewing marriage and family. In her late memoir Childhood at Brindabella she comments briefly on the demographic realities of country Australia. “Young women were worshipped on the remote stations when men were many and women a rarity. Any normal woman, with health and youth, whether in kitchen or drawing-room, was a magnet.” The drawing-room with its piano is the centre of social life in this lopsided world.

In the drawing-room on Saturday nights Mother would go through her “pieces” culminating in “The Maiden’s Prayer”, which was the gem of any genteel finishing school’s repertory. Half-a-dozen men, and frequently more, formed an appreciative audience. Old songs would be sung, while in kitchen or hut men without women would sing songs from song books interspersed by solos on concertina, jew’s harp or mouth organ. Among the guests sometimes would be a player, and that would be a treat indeed.

In addition to the favourable odds for young women of any distinction at all, there was the familial pressure to find a decent situation. In My Brilliant Career when sixteen year-old Sybylla Melvyn’s Sydney lawyer relative, Mr. Everard Gray, offers to introduce her to the life of the stage, her Grandmother recoils: “Go on the stage! A grand-daughter of mine! Lucy’s eldest child! An actress—a vile, low, brazen hussy!”

Mr. Gray tries to reason that it would be such a shame to waste Sybylla’s musical talents and that she could have a “brilliant career”, to which Granny responds:

Career! That is all girls think of now, instead of being good wives and mothers and attending to their homes and doing what God intended. All they think of is gadding about and being fast, and ruining themselves body and soul. And the men are as bad to encourage them.

Louisa Lawson, Henry’s mother, a writer in her own right, describes bush women as belonging to “civilisation’s utmost fringe.” They are “a race apart,” as they live out “their honest, hard-worked, silent, almost masculine lives.” The isolation of bush life, in Lawson’s opinion seemed to produce a desperate naivete.

To hear of a life she does not know, to get news and speech of outside things from even the most worthless stranger, is payment enough for all the shelter, food and assistance that she offers. It is such an incursion of novelty into her dreary domain of changeless months, that it is a pleasure and a relief no town-bred woman can understand.

And yet, in the young girls of the bush she also saw great potential:

The girls are of very quick intelligence; they learn everything rapidly, and surpass the boys. Where they have a chance the make clever women, and a great number become school-teachers, but in those who get no schooling this astuteness turns to slyness and cunning. Take them all round, they are fine girls, always ready in an emergency, and capable of anything. Tough, healthy, and alert, they can cook or sew, do fancy-work or farm-work, dance, ride, tend cattle, keep a garden, break in a colt. They are the stuff that a fine race is made of—these daughters of bush-women.

Although there was a more or less recognisable feminism well under way by the end of the 19^th century, Franklin’s determination to forge her own path had less to do with trailblazing as a woman, let alone a rejection of her family, whom she loved and admired her whole life, particularly her Grandmother, but a recognition of her own unique calling. Her pursuit of an artistic career was also a rejection of the masculinising effect of the bush, with its all-consuming manual labour, upon its women. But it was still a radical break from convention. The narrator of My Brilliant Career is quite clear-eyed about what rejecting marriage and family would mean, freedom yes, but also the potential for crushing loneliness later in life. Like a nun, Franklin embraced the difficulty of living out her particularly feminine calling.

Because of the enormous force of her personality, a feminist narrative has built up around Franklin that focuses solely on the broad outlines of her life, while ignoring the details. Most notable is the commonly repeated refrain that Franklin was somehow forced by circumstance to use a male moniker in order to be published. While she herself and others since have claimed that her use of male names was to help the reception of her books, which would have suffered otherwise, the reality is quite different.

From the first pages of My Brilliant Career, Henry Lawson knew it had been written by a girl, as indeed any halfway experienced reader can tell. This was not disqualifying for him, or for his publisher in England, Blackwoods, who released the novel in 1901 with Lawson’s introductory note stating this fact. Franklin gave herself other male pseudonyms throughout her life, most famously Brent of Bin Bin, long after her literary reputation was secure.

Literary scholar Colin Roderick argues convincingly in his biography of Franklin, Her Brilliant Career (1982) that Franklin used her male pseudonyms to conceal her fears of childbearing and death from herself. Roderick, who was named by Franklin as one of the inaugural judges of the Miles Franklin Award, had the advantage of knowing Franklin personally. He engages in what we would now regard as over-determined psychological biography, but his insights are useful when lightly held.

Of Franklin’s many years in America writing and working in support of various feminist causes, Roderick sees simply as “a mere crackling of thorns under a pot”, an energetic way of spinning her wheels, avoiding her suppressed maternal instinct and defending herself against the risk of literary failure. In her creation of the Miles Franklin Award he saw a caretaking impulse, “a delayed expansion of her maternal instinct to encompass the whole Australian scene.” Her loyalties always lay with her pioneer ancestors, the men and women of the bush, who were the fire and clay of her literary imagination. “What shines most brilliantly from her storm-tossed life and tireless work is neither letters nor feminism, but devotion to the spirit of an expanding Australia.”

Roderick hits the mark when he says she chose her pseudonyms, not for any fear that she wouldn’t be published as a woman, but for psychologically self-protective reasons. She also loved spinning mysteries. The elaborate games and schemes she devised for posting and receiving correspondence to keep her various ruses alive was a constant source of entertainment (as well as stress). In 1950 she even gave a series of lectures on Australian literature at the University of Western Australia including several on her own Brent of Bin Bin novels without revealing the true identity of their author, which at that time was still unknown. Having never finished high school, and with her well-known disdain for the academy she would have relished the irony.

It is surprising then that Franklin’s legacy has been appropriated by bourgeois feminists, most notably in recent times by the Stella Prize for women authors. Although she was a well-publicised element of its founding in 2012 there is hardly now a mention of Miles Franklin on the Stella Prize website. Only in Aviva Tuffield’s account of the formation of the initial group is there a brief mention of “reclaiming” (for whom and against whom?) “Miles Franklin’s first name.”

I suspect there is little mention of Franklin in the Stella Prize publicity because to delve too deeply into her life, to read her diaries and letters, is to call into question that she would have been pleased to see herself used in such a way. It is hard to imagine Sybylla Melvyn asking for special recognition for her work because she happens to be female.

Most new fiction and non-fiction in Australia is written and consumed by women and has been for many years. The need the Stella Prize claims to address, under-representation of women in publishing, is a non-problem. Aside from that, it is misguided philosophically and psychologically. To appropriate the name of Stella Maria Sarah Miles when she is no longer alive to give her assent or dissent, borders on monstrous. What is needed is good and great works, no matter who writes them. If Henry Lawson was able to see clearly the merits of My Brilliant Career while knowing the author was a girl, why should women writers of today fear a frank public reception? Feminists can have their separate playpen with its rapidly diminishing returns, or they can be taken seriously as equal players. Any self-respecting author or artist wouldn’t have it any other way.

Rather, women writers should look to Miles Franklin as a triumphant figure, who early on embraced a calling and remained true to it, without expecting the world around her to pick up the pieces of the natural consequences of her decision. The award that bears her name is a priceless legacy to the nation she loved.