File:StateLibQld 2 101880 Miles Franklin.jpg

English: Miles Franklin.

Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, a fifth-generation Australian, was born in 1879 on the grazing property of her maternal grandmother near Tumut in New South Wales. She spent the early part of her life at the family property in the Monaro region of NSW. In 1889 the family moved to a smaller property near Goulburn, NSW, and then in 1903 to Penrith, a suburb on the western outskirts of Sydney and finally in 1914 to Carlton, a south-west Sydney suburb. At nineteen she wrote My Brilliant Career, the novel for which she is most admired. It is widely regarded as an important study of the opportunities and expectations faced by young Australian women in the 1890s.

In the first years of the twentieth century Franklin wrote a sequel to her successful first novel, but My Career Goes Bung did not find a publisher until 1946. Franklin worked as a governess, teacher and nurse. She left Australia in 1906, travelling first to America, where she was heavily involved in the Women's Movement, then to England. Here she worked as a cook and volunteered as a nurse in Macedonia during World War I. She worked as a secretary in London after the war and, during the 1920s, she began to write pseudonymously a series of six well-received novels. In 1932 Franklin returned to Australia permanently, beginning her important contributions to the promotion and development of Australian literature. This culminated in her Commonwealth Literary Fund lectures delivered at the University of Western Australia in 1950. She won several prizes for her writing, including the Prior Memorial Prize.