Presenting My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin and The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson with illustrations by Nicholas Tamblyn and Katherine Eglund. These Australian coming of age classics are part of The Great Books Series by Golding Books.
My Brilliant Career is one of the most celebrated Australian novels, a unique coming of age classic with a memorable and strong female lead in Sybylla Melvyn, an aspiring artist and an individual who is in many ways ahead of her time. Miles Franklin's first novel, written while she was still a teenager, also influenced Australian history (and Australian literature) in many ways that the author could not have predicted, being a key launching pad for her long career and its culmination in the prestigious Miles Franklin Award, and just as significant a launching pad for film luminaries (involved in making the film of the novel in 1979) such as director Gilliam Armstrong and actors Judy Davis and Sam Neill.
Just as important in Australian feminist literature, and Australian fiction in general, is The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson. It presents another strong female character in Laura Tweedle Rambotham, an imaginative storyteller that undergoes great challenges at a Melbourne boarding school (based on Richardson's own experiences). As with My Brilliant Career, a film of the novel (made in 1978) was significant in the Australian film industry (and beyond), being directed by Bruce Beresford and starring Susannah Fowle, John Waters, and Barry Humphries (of Dame Edna Everage fame).
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, known as Miles Franklin, was born in 1879 in Talbingo, New South Wales. She is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, published in 1901 with the help of writer Henry Lawson. Though she wrote throughout her life, her other popular novel, All That Swagger, was not published until 1936. In 1906, Franklin moved to Chicago and undertook secretarial work for Australian Alice Henry at the National Women's Trade Union League, and also co-edited the league's magazine, Life and Labor. After volunteering as a hospital cook attached to the Serbian army near Lake Ostrovo later in World War I, from 1919 to 1926 she worked as Secretary with the National Housing and Town Planning Association in London. After the death of her father in 1931, Franklin resettled in Australia. She resolutely encouraged writers and the growth of Australian literature, and her endowment of the annual Miles Franklin Award rewards works about "Australian Life in any of its phases." Franklin died at the age of 74.
Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, known by her pen name of Henry Handel Richardson, was born in East Melbourne, Victoria, in 1870. Her family lived in various Victorian towns, including Chiltern, Queenscliff, Koroit, and Maldon; her mother was postmistress at Maldon (her father having died of syphilis when she was nine). Richardson went to board at the Presbyterian Ladies' College in Melbourne from ages 13 to 17, excelling there in the arts and music, and some of these experiences were the basis for The Getting of Wisdom (1910). In 1888, her mother took the family to Europe to enable Richardson to continue her musical studies at the Leipzig Conservatorium. While in Leipzig-where her first novel, Maurice Guest (1908), is set-she met the Scot John George Robertson (a student and later teacher of German literature). In 1894 they married in Munich; his subsequent posting at University College would take them to London. Richardson returned to Australia in 1912 to research family history for her trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (comprising novels Australia Felix (1917), The Way Home (1925), and Ultima Thule (1929)-the latter awarded the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for 1929), but this would be her last return home. Richardson died in Hastings, England, in 1946.
