Her Brilliant Career


Book Description

Stella Miles Franklin became an international publishing sensation in 1901, with "My Brilliant Career," a portrayal of an ambitious and independent woman defying social expectations that still captivates readers. In a magisterial biography, Roe details Miles' extraordinary life.




Stella Miles Franklin


Book Description

This biography is an authoritative account of the novelist, journalist, nationalist, feminist and larrikin Stella Miles Franklin, author of My Brilliant Career and a great literary figure. This account follows her story from her beginnings in the Australian bush, through her publishing success and time spent in Chicago, USA.




My Career Goes Bung


Book Description

Sybylla, strong-headed and capable, lived her sixteen years of life in the Australian outback, in poverty. She fondly remembers her younger years, including her parents' concern about her not being very feminine. At the age of ten, her life changes dramatically: bankruptcy, drought and humiliation bring her and her family to the brink of poverty. At fifteen, Sybylla is invited to her grandmother's estate and there she takes up hobbies such as music, books and art. She also falls in love and experiences for the first time the joy and pain that love can bring...




Ladies, We Need To Talk


Book Description

Ladies, We Need To Talk breaks the stigma around everything women are thinking but not saying. Yumi Stynes and Claudine Ryan cover all the trickiest taboo topics from their hit podcast, from bodies and mental health to sex and relationships. The ABC podcast Ladies, We Need To Talk has been tearing open the sealed section on life for years, but host Yumi Stynes and co-creator Claudine Ryan know there’s still way more to say. In this book, they dive further into the podcast topics that resonated most with sensitivity, hilarity and serious smarts, and open the conversation further to include personal stories from listeners. Want to discover the wonders of your vagina or know how to close the orgasm gap? Are you riding your hormonal rollercoaster blindfolded or feeling a bit weird about your period? Do you want to kick your mental load to the kerb or consider the alternatives to monogamy? You're not the only one – and there’s no need to go it alone. Ladies, We Need To Talk is a book for all women who feel the squeeze between their private life and their pelvic floor.




Miss Franklin


Book Description

This is a story about iconic Australian writer Stella Miles Franklin, namesake of two major literary prizes, during her brief but formative time as a governess in rural New South Wales. Teenager Stella Miles Franklin has to work to help support her family. Stella is unhappy in her job and longs for the freedom and excitement of city life. While working, she meets a young orphan girl, Imp, who is almost as feisty as Stella herself, and who spurs the older girl to follow her dreams. Inspired by events in Miles Franklin's life, Miss Franklin is told by multi-award-winning author Libby Hathorn and acclaimed illustrator Phil Lesnie, and includes a facts page about Stella Miles Franklin. Shortlisted for the Society of Women Writers NSW 2020 Members' Book Award.




The Life to Come


Book Description

Winner of the Miles Franklin Literary Award Shortlisted for the Stella Prize Longlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award “For a novel concerned with dislocation, there's a lot of grounding humor in The Life to Come. Most of it comes at the expense of Pippa and her ilk, but de Kretser's observations are so spot on, you'll forgive her even as you cringe.”—Amelia Lester, New York Times Book Review Set in Australia, France, and Sri Lanka, The Life to Come is about the stories we tell and don’t tell ourselves as individuals, as societies, and as nations. Driven by a vivid cast of characters, it explores necessary emigration, the art of fiction, and ethnic and class conflict. Pippa is a writer who longs for success and eventually comes to fear that she “missed everything important.” Celeste tries to convince herself that her feelings for her married lover are reciprocated. Ash makes strategic use of his childhood in Sri Lanka, but blots out the memory of a tragedy from that time. Sri Lankan Christabel endures her dull job and envisions a brighter future that “rose, glittered, and sank back,” while she neglects the love close at hand. The stand–alone yet connected worlds of The Life to Come offer meditations on intimacy, loneliness, and our flawed perception of reality. Enormously moving, gorgeously observant of physical detail, and often very funny, this new novel by Michelle de Kretser reveals how the shadows cast by both the past and the future can transform and distort the present. It is teeming with life and earned wisdom—exhilaratingly contemporary, with the feel of a classic.




All That Swagger


Book Description

All That Swagger has been acclaimed by pundits as one of the best Australian books yet composed. The story develops from the center outwards from one who feels the enchantment of Australia. The characters are established in the dirt, the woodland, as the early pioneers were. One subject anxieties character - that backbone of direction, hardihood boldness, honesty, which should perpetually be the establishment of any stable and moral State or condition of society. It introduces the courageous independence with which the extraordinary Australian landmass has been investigated, studied, fenced, cleared, furrowed, and is presently monitored by a virile people. Here is an immense canvas, State-wide, and as long as history itself - to the extent that it contains the depiction of life and improvement in this station of the British Empire. Aptitude and condition have productively consolidated in the generation. The author moves living pieces on the squares of a mammoth chessboard, and she plays the game such that shows obviously that she comprehends the gambit of life and every one of its varieties. All That Swagger is all Australian in each word. Just an Australian could have composed it.




Stella Miles Franklin


Book Description

The award-winning biography of one of Australia's best-loved writers ... The author of MY BRILLAINT CAREER had a fascinating career of her own ... Winner of the Adelaide Festival Award for Literature for Non-Fiction 2010 'a long-awaited and splendidly breezy blockbuster biography of the indefatigable, self-inventing and campaigning author of My Brilliant Career' Richard Holmes, AUStRALIAN BOOK REVIEW 'to meet Miles Franklin was as invigorating as to ride on a spring morning across the Monaro plains she so dearly loved' Henrietta Drake-Brockman Stella Miles Franklin was born in the Australian bush. At the age of twenty-one, she became an international publishing sensation with MY BRILLIANt CAREER, which more than a century later is still regarded as an Australian classic. Miles' early success gave her entree to literary and socialist circles in Sydney and Melbourne. there she met Banjo Paterson, the Goldstein sisters and Joseph Furphy, among others. In 1906 she went to work for the women's labour movement in Chicago. In 1915 she relocated to London and quickly found herself travelling to the Balkans to help nurse wounded Allied soldiers. Returning to London, she campaigned for various feminist and progressive causes, all the while continuing to write, often submitting work under pseudonyms that she guarded fiercely all her life. In the 1930s she returned to Australia, taking up the cause of Australian writers. Novelist, journalist, nationalist, feminist, larrikin - Miles Franklin was all these and more. And her endowment of the Miles Franklin Literary Award founded an Australian cultural institution that remains our most prestigious prize for literature.'more than the definitive biography of Australia's most gregarious literary figure' WEEKEND AUStRALIAN 'Roe's mighty biography of a woman who was pivotal to the culture during a formative period of Australian literary life is meticulous and welcome' Hilary McPhee, tHE AUStRALIAN




The Strays


Book Description

"Disturbing and magical....with a grace and eloquence." - NPR Books "Full of lush, mesmerizing detail and keen insight into the easy intimacy between young girls which disappears with adulthood." -- The New Yorker "The Strays is a knowing novel, and beautifully done." -- Meg Wolitzer, New York Times bestselling author of The Interestings For readers of Atonement, a hauntingly powerful story about the fierce friendship between three sisters and their friend as they grow up on the outskirts of their parents' wild and bohemian artistic lives. On her first day at a new school, Lily befriends Eva and her sisters Beatrice and Heloise, daughters of the infamous avant-garde painter Evan Trentham. An only child from an unremarkable, working-class family, Lily has never experienced a household like the Trenthams'--a community of like-minded artists Evan and his wife have created, all living and working together to escape the stifling conservatism of 1930's Australia. And Lily has never met anyone like Eva, whose unabashed confidence and worldly knowledge immediately draw her in. Infatuated by the creative chaos of the Trenthams and the artists who orbit them, Lily aches to fully belong in their world, craving something beyond her own ordinary life. She becomes a fixture in their home, where she and Eva spend their days lounging in the garden, filching cigarettes and wine, and skirting the fringes of the adults' glamorous lives, who create scandalous art during the day and host lavish, debauched parties by night. But as seductive as the artists' utopian vision appears, behind it lies both darkness and dysfunction. And the further the girls are pulled in, the greater the consequences become. With elegance and vibrancy, The Strays evokes the intense bonds of girlhood friendships, the volatile undercurrents of a damaged family, and the yearning felt by an outsider looking in.




Some Everyday Folk and Dawn


Book Description

It is 1904 and women's suffrage has hit the small town of Noonoon. Though the election campaigners preen themselves for the women's vote, the fight isn't entirely won, for the male residents are bristling at this threat to their supremacy. And down at Clay's there are other problems too: Dawn is now a young woman and in these days of slender chances Grandma Clay must keep an eye on the marriage market. But Dawn, lively and outspoken wants a career on the stage.