(This story of the horse and cattle stations of the Murrum...)
This story of the horse and cattle stations of the Murrumbidgee area of New South Wales (Australia) is the second in a saga which follows the fortunes of the families introduced in "Up the Country", an earlier novel written by Miles Franklin under the pen name "Brent of Bin Bin". It takes the story to the middle of the 1890s.
(Set in the highlands of New South Wales, this is the stor...)
Set in the highlands of New South Wales, this is the story of the Delacy family. Fanny marries Johanna in the 1830s and from there follow generations of indomitable Delacys heading towards the new century and the tragedy that would be World War I.
Stella Maraia Sarah Miles Franklin was an Australian novelist. A sound chronicler and a satirist, she wrote with a sure but sensitive touch on the theme of her country's pioneer settlers.
Background
Stella Maraia Sarah Miles Franklin was born in Talbingo, Australia, in the open rangelands of southern New South Wales on October 14, 1879. John Franklin, a rancher and landowner, and Margaret Susannah Eleanor (Lampe) Franklin were her parents. Franklin absorbed the lore of the upland grazing country before her father became a homesteader in 1891 and began dairy farming near Goulburn.
Education
Franklin was educated at home until 1889 and then attended a public school near Goulburn, Australia.
Career
Franklin appeared suddenly on the literary scene with her first novel, My Brilliant Career, written when she was sixteen. Although the work contains the flaws of structure and composition that might be expected from such a young author, it also displays vigor, budding talent, a pervasive feminism and the strong nationalism that was developing in Australia.
My Brilliant Career, when it first appeared, proved an embarrassment to Franklin’s family and friends, who, along with most contemporary critics, assumed the poverty, drunkenness and melodramatic episodes portrayed in the novel were more autobiographical than fictional. In fact, while her heroine’s attitudes were Franklin’s, the details of her heroine’s life were not. Upset by the misinterpretation, Franklin wrote a satiric sequel. My Career Goes Bung, which was not published for forty-five years. Franklin eventually suppressed her first book, making provisions for its publication ten years after her death. She referred to the novel in her volume of literary criticism, Laughter, Not for a Cage, as a “girl’s story ... conceived and tossed off on impulse in a matter of weeks.” She withdrew the work from print because of “the stupid literalness with which it was taken to be her own autobiography,” which “startled and disillusioned then constrained her.”
After My Brilliant Career was published, Franklin worked briefly in Sydney as a freelance journalist before traveling to the United States. She worked in Chicago for the National Women’s Trade Union League, and wrote the novel Some Everyday Folk and Dawn, in which she attempted unsuccessfully to write about the United States with the same informal intimacy that had characterized her Australian stories. At the start of World War I Franklin moved to London, becoming active in social work, and did not return to Australia until 1933. Later in life, she established the Miles Franklin Award, a prize of five hundred pounds awarded annually to the best novel illuminating a phase of Australian life.
In 1930 Up the Country appeared under the pseudonym “Brent of Bin Bin.” Since at that time Franklin had published only her first two books, she was not thought of as the possible author. But as more of her works appeared, along with five more novels by “Brent of Bin Bin,” critics began to note the similarities of style, vocabulary, characterization, theme, and setting in both Franklin’s and “Brent’s” works. Events in the Bin Bin books, which corresponded to events in Franklin’s own life, seemed to support the argument of her authorship. Franklin never publicly claimed authorship of the Bin Bin books, but friends have said that in her last years she privately admitted having written them. Most critics today believe that she did so, though some cite her steadfast public denial as proof of alternate authorship. Some critics have conjectured that she possibly wrote them in collaboration with another author, or that she worked almost directly from existing records. The novels signed by “Brent of Bin Bin” share with those signed by Miles Franklin pride and joy in Australian nationalism, dissatisfaction with the status of women, and great admiration for the pioneer, the squatter, the farmer, and the swagman, who explored, homesteaded, and opened up the new continent.
Aside from My Brilliant Career, Franklin’s most significant work is All That Swagger, a saga spanning Well over a hundred years in the lives of a family of European immigrants in Australia. The chief figure in fhe chronicle is Danny Delacey, called Franklin’s most skillful male characterization. Delacey was based, as was the hero of the earlier Old Blastus of Bandicoot, on Franklin’s grandfather; in fact, most of Franklin's plots and characters were drawn from her life and family history. It is when she attempted to Write about non-Australian places and people that her writing was weakest. All That Swagger, and the “Brent of Bin Bin” novel series, helped to popularize the saga form in English writing.
Quotations:
“Our greatest heart-treasure is a knowledge that there is in creation an individual to whom our existence is necessary - some one who is part of our life as we are part of theirs, some one in whose life we feel assured our death would leave a gap for a day or two.”
“I am afflicted with the power of thought, which is a heavy curse. The less a person thinks and inquires regarding the why and the wherefore and the justice of things, when dragging along through life, the happier it is for him, and doubly, trebly so, for her.”
“There is any amount of love and good in the world, but you must search for it. Being misunderstood is one of the trials we all must bear. I think that even the most common-minded person in the land has inner thoughts and feelings which no one can share with him, and the higher one's organization the more one must suffer in that respect.”
“Knitting is not enough.”
“This is not a romance — I have too often faced the music of life to the tune of hardship to waste time in snivelling and gushing over fancies and dreams [author's introduction]”
“life itself is anything beyond a heartless little chimera- it is as real in its weariness and bitter heartache”
“A woman writer, except in rare instances, has no protection such as enjoyed by men who use their wives and mistresses as a marline to save themselves from the wear and tear of interruption.”
Connections
While Miles Franklin had many suitors, she never married.