An Irishwoman’s Diary on Australian novelist Miles Franklin

On several levels, it was a good story, about as close to a feel-good story as publishing can offer these days. No saga of endless rejection, no defiance, no controversy and not a disgruntled fundamentalist or environmental protester in sight.

When the announcement was made last Thursday, in the evening Australian time, in the morning Irish time, that Evie Wyld had won this year's Miles Franklin Award, readers cheered. Here was the author of a very good book, emerging victorious from a short list of five other writers, three other women and two men, all six having written very good books. The biggest story may well have been that neither four-time previous winner, Tim Winton's Eyrie, nor Richard Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North had won. But Ms Wyld is not exactly a beginner, her winning novel, All The Birds, Singing, her second, had also won two other prizes last week, while her debut, After the Fire, A Small Still Voice (2009) was well reviewed and made several shortlists.

Now in its 58th year the Miles Franklin Award, which was first presented to Patrick White for Voss, is a major prize. As for Miles Franklin, a literary benefactor certainly, she was a visionary who set up the prize to support not only Australian writers but to honour books about Australia. She was above all a writer well aware of the hazards of writing.

Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin was born in 1879 to pioneering stock in New South Wales. At first, life was good but then her father lost his money and turned to alcohol after the family moved from his cattle station to dire poverty. Stella was 10, old enough to be devastated by the changes, not only to her life but to her mother who became embittered. Stella's response was to write it all down. By 16 she had completed one of the liveliest debuts in literary history, My Brilliant Career, which as she recalled as being "conceived and tossed off in a matter of weeks." Getting it published took longer, about six years and then, using a male name.

Today, 113 years after that initial publication, it remains as fresh and as candid, and as courageous as it was when it first shocked readers with its many truths and insights. Young Sybylla, the narrator, is a practical girl, aware that her lack of beauty, which seems such a disadvantage but may well be her salvation. She wants a life, a career and independence. Marriage is to be avoided; she dismisses it as degradation. Loneliness is her destiny and she accepts this with a determined fatalism which causes her to reject rich, handsome, passive and incredibly forgiving Harold or “Harry” Beecham, master of Five-Bib Downs. There are flashes of Jane Austen’s Lizzie Bennet, while in the characterisation of the M’Swat family there are some impressively Dickensian flourishes. And all of this, from a writer who was only 16 years old, yet already a natural observer with a feel for detail.

Sybylla is difficult, even infuriating and very real, the risk-taker who speaks for everyone. She has expectations, another nod to Dickens. In recalling Harry’s proposal to her, she reports: “He did not turn red or white, or yellow or green, nor did he tremble or stammer, or cry or laugh, or become fierce or passionate, or tender or anything but just himself . . . He displayed no more emotion than had he been inviting me to a picnic.” Later, there is a remarkable scene in which she strikes him across the face with a whip and stands shocked at her action.

When it was published in 1901, it made her famous and notorious. Her family and neighbours were horrified. She moved to Sydney and spent a year working as a housemaid, while she wrote a sequel, My Career Goes Bung. Its rejection caused her to head off to America, where she managed the Chicago office of the Women's Trade Union League and wrote another book, Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909).

Following the outbreak of the first World War, she went to London to help in slum nurseries before travelling out to work in Salonika and later Serbia. The same energy that inspires My Brilliant Career informed her life. By 1933 she had returned to Australia, and settled alone in Sydney. She never returned to the bush but it lived in her heart. My Career Goes Bung was eventually published in 1946.

She died in 1954 and instructed that My Brilliant Career, by then long out of print but the most enduring of her 17 books, was not to be republished until 10 years after her death. Kind, generous and practical, Miles Franklin was well liked, even loved for her honesty. Her first novel, with its impatient hunger for life and true, devastating love, is a rare book – it causes the spirit to soar.