Her Brilliant Career
Miles Franklin was an enigma, until someone managed to crack the code in which she wrote her desperate, hilarious diaries to hide the writings from her mother.
Through the prism of their love/hate relationship, the play brings to life Miles’ stellar rise to fame as a young girl and why she was never able to repeat it. We see her refusal to commit to marriage; her years in Chicago working alongside the Suffragettes, why she had to stay away from Australia for close to thirty years yet remained a trenchant nationalist who joined a pro-fascist group on her return. Haunted by poverty and failure, she established the Miles Franklin Award that remains Australia’s highest literary prize.
I loved this. It was the workshopping of a play but very interesting and I learnt a lot. The venue was delightful too