But from reading her work, Feaver can imagine, and uses the anger and sadness that weaves its way throughout the Franklin oeuvre to fully flesh out the main character in her play. There's no copy of the original manuscript by Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, so we'll never know what was cut by Lawson, the agent or publisher. Miles was furious the men ignored both her requests and someone cut the 'more salacious' sections - the feminism- without consulting her. While it is fantastic to be in contemporary conversation about this text, it's depressing too." I'm looking at this next decade of my life and realising if I have a baby, I may not write again, or as much, and the likelihood that I will be not the primary carer for my children is very high. "I know I personally feel that all the choices that I have to make as a woman come with some cost attached to it that men don't have to consider in their career. And we're still talking about the gender pay gap today. when Sybylla is railing against the fact that she can go get a job and economic independence, not a husband, but she'll be paid less than a man for the same work. But then there's the other side of it which hasn't changed. "There's a reading of My Brilliant Career as a period piece that allows us to acknowledge the work that all these generations of women have done to allow me, for example, to be writing this play today for Belvoir.
She lists the obvious: women can now vote, a career and marriage are not mutually exclusive, there's contraception and childbirth is no longer always a life-threatening endeavour. Over a fattoush salad, and a mixture of hot and cold finger food including golden fried cauliflower, a selection of dips and sambousik cheese, I ask Feaver what has changed for Australian women since Franklin wrote her story. Today it is regarded as "the first Australian novel" and has not been out of print since 1966. It was never to be reprinted in her lifetime and when she died in 1954, she left instructions in her will that it was not to be reprinted until 10 years after her death. Packages of dusty old second-hand editions from all over the world started lining up on her London doorstep, like suitors wanting to court Sybylla Melvyn, the lead character of the book Franklin wrote as a teen in the late 1890s.Įven though My Brilliant Career received glowing reviews and was reprinted six times in three years, in 1910 Franklin instructed Blackwood to cease publication.
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