Friday essay: Miles Franklin’s other brilliant career – her year as an undercover servant

By Kerrie Davies, Senior Lecturer, School of the Arts & Media, UNSW Sydney

In the Miles Franklin archive in the State Library of New South Wales there are two brown, cloth-bound volumes, titled, “When I was Mary-Anne, A Slavey”. The thick, handwritten pages are amended with glued paper inserts copied from the missing diary the author of My Brilliant Career kept for roughly a year between April 1903 and April 1904.

In an accompanying summary, on which Franklin based her 1904 letter to the Bulletin about the…

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