KERRIE DAVIES Miles Franklin Undercover. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Author Kerrie Davies explores Miles Franklin’s life in the decades after the success of My Brilliant Career.

A book is written in solitude and in a crowd, at night, in the early morning, on weekends, and in thoughts and in dreams.

So writes Kerrie Davies in her Acknowledgements, and Miles Franklin would certainly have agreed. Davies goes on to credit Jill Roe’s ‘cradle to grave’ biography of Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, together with Roe’s collection of Franklin’s letters and non-fiction writing, for ‘providing a map’ for her to follow. But her own creative non-fiction is the result of her research on an unpublished Franklin manuscript titled ‘When I was Mary Ann, a Slavey’. She was prompted to wonder, ‘How did she do it and, why?’

Miles Franklin Undercover follows the years of Franklin’s life during which she was first ‘Miles Franklin’ – famous author of My Brilliant Career; then ‘Sarah’ – the ‘live-in maid’, who wrote a book about her experiences; then ‘Stella/Vernacular’, who wrote articles for the Sydney Morning Herald, moved to America, and eventually became personal secretary to Margaret Dreier Robins, president of the American National Women’s Trade Union League.

Davies begins her story on the Franklin family’s drought-stricken Australian farm:

The late winter of 1901. A burning frost, instead of rain. Her mother had named their property Stillwater for the ponds Miles had once swam in among turtles and leeches, long shrivelled into shallow holes. The surviving cows stumbled beside bleached bones by the rim of the fading waterline. Crumbled wattle flowers blew across the farm like yellow confetti, the only colour beyond a relentless brown.

Miles’s first book has just been published as My Brilliant Career, without the question mark she had stipulated must come after ‘Brilliant’. She is delighted, but annoyed by this omission and by being called ‘a little bush girl’ by the poet Henry Lawson, who has written the preface. However, the kerosene tin nailed to the front fence of the property to serve as a mail box is suddenly overflowing with letters, so many that ‘the mailman could not keep up with reading them all’.

Because of the good reviews, young women from all over Australia, and from England, had read her book and loved it. There were letters from country girls, town girls, factory girls, girls from all social classes, and one from an English woman who wrote that she felt ‘very daring’ writing to an author she had never met, but she had been ‘so moved’ by the book that she couldn’t ‘refrain from trying’. She also wrote that she had always planned ‘to write and practice more before [she] tried seriously to publish’ but college education and marriage meant that she now had ‘no time to think of literature or myself when I am engaged in living happily ever after …’ Miles took this as a warning.

Closer to home, Mrs Rose Scott, a well-known suffragist, wrote to Miles as ‘my dear fellow woman’, saying ‘I should like if you will pay for a ticket + stay with me’.

Miles’s clothes were ‘of the bush’ but her mother sewed two new dresses for her and found a room for her in a Sydney boarding house. She arrived at Rose’s weekly salon and was presented to the guests – ‘politicians, judges, artists, activists, poets, editors, novelists, musicians, journalists and critics’ – as Rose’s ‘latest protégé’. She remained Rose’s ‘Dear girl’ and it was through Rose that she met Mrs O’Sullivan, the wife of the New South Wales Secretary for Works, who agreed to provide Miles with a character reference after hearing of her plan to ‘go undercover’ as a servant and then write about her experiences.

Throughout the book, Davies uses news items of the period to establish a feeling of the times, and extracts from letters and memoirs that provide glimpses into the character and behaviour of some of the many people Miles corresponded with and met.

A.B. Paterson, for example, (‘ Banjo Paterson’, whose poem ‘The Man from Snowy River’ was ‘read, recited + repeated everywhere’), became so frequent a correspondent that their mail often crossed. He was sophisticated and worldly, very different to Miles, and when she sent him some of the new short stories that she had written, he thought some ‘sheer drivel’. But he can see that she is a writer and he suggests she might collaborate with him on a ‘racing & sporting yarn’ he has written that needs ‘a crime or a rival – a villain’ to liven it up. Miles refuses, wanting to remain ‘her own heroine’. Her stories relied heavily on her own experiences, and judging by a scene she creates in one of them, Paterson, when they met, had become over-amorous, so she dropped him.

A chance meeting with artist Norman Lindsay was also potentially disastrous. In a memoir, Lindsay wrote of her ‘pert nose’, and hair that cascaded to a ‘pert rump’; but to his annoyance he was warned off by the critic of the The Bulletin magazine, whose office he and Miles were visiting at the time.

In ‘Part Two, Sarah’, Davies immerses the reader, with Miles, in the life of a domestic servant. Stillwater has failed and the family has had to leave it and move to a Sydney suburb. Miles needs to get work to sustain herself but she also wants to ‘go undercover’ and research a prospective book. Dressed as a shop-girl or maid might dress, she makes the depressing round of employment agencies, and experiences the difficulties of finding work.

In her first job, with the Findlayson family, she cooks and cleans, answers the door to tradesmen, takes in deliveries, earns ten shillings a week and has no time off. But she is ‘the maid who watched, and who wrote down everything she saw and heard.’ Her second job is with a family where she is paid eleven shillings a week, which includes hand washing the family’s clothes (no mangle), in a house that is cold and damp. Using Franklin’s own notes, Kerrie Davies paints the scene:

The nanny came in, with a personality like mildew. A rising damp that chilled any friendliness.

“What’s the Master like?’ she asked the nanny, to make conversation.

‘A contemptible little old fat cock sparrow of a thing.’

Mr Findlayson had been a cock too. He’d crowed in the morning for his breakfast. Then strutted in front of his hens, who sat docilely laying eggs. She had wanted to wring his neck, and it seemed that here the Master of the house would be the same sort of rooster.

After two days ‘Sarah’ gives notice.

Next, she works as parlour-maid in a boarding house. The guests are interesting, breakfast-time is like a zoo, and the girls she works with name the guests after animals. It all provides rich material for her book. Other jobs in wealthier homes teach her that she must not look too smart and ‘take the shine’ out of her female employer; and that employers can be devious.

After a year ‘her cap was fraying. Her diary was nearly full.’ She goes home, attends her sister’s wedding, completes her manuscript and sends the draft to the publisher George Robertson. Robertson finds ‘When I was Mary Anne, a Slavey’, too long, and too confusing. He had warned her before that it was ‘acceptable to write about country bumpkins but not about the better class’. He is most concerned that she has now recklessly written about people who are easily identifiable, and ‘the spheres of influence in Sydney and Melbourne were simply too small and powerful to take such a risk’. He rejects it; just as he had rejected ‘On the Outside Track’ – Miles’s hurried sequel to My Brilliant Career. A reader for her London publisher also found that her work ‘needed more sense, modesty and style’.

She had hoped her ship would come in with the advances on her new book. Then all seemed lost in a sea of rejection, until the critic suggested she write articles for the Sydney Morning Herald, and the pounds slowly built up in her bank account.

So, hearing of the opportunities in America from Vida Goldstein, who has become a good friend since they had met through Rose, Miles books a voyage to San Francisco. She arrives three days after the devastating 1906 earthquake, sees and experiences the horrors, difficulties and the shortages that follow it, sends off an account of it to the Sydney Morning Herald, and so becomes their overseas correspondent.

Davies writes in detail of Miles’s life, work and travels in America. She tells her story well and by the end of the book, when Miles returns to Australia, you want to know what happens to this determined, capable and spirited young woman. To find out, you will have to read Jill Roe’s biography, which Davies describes as ‘rich reading’.

Miles Franklin Undercover is a fine example of a mixture of fiction and fact that brings history and people to life in an absorbing and authentic way. Davies provides detailed notes of her sources and is especially careful to note when what she writes is ‘speculation’. If her long-time immersion in Franklin’s writings leads to her own prose sometimes taking on a similarly imaginative style, this only adds to the feeling for Miles that she creates.

Kerrie Davies Miles Franklin Undercover Allen & Unwin 2025 PB 384pp $34.99

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

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Tags: Australian history, Australian women writers, biography, creative nonfiction, domestic servants, Jill Roe, Kerrie | Davies, Miles Franklin, My Brilliant Career, When I was Mary Ann A Slavey