Jill Roe, author of Stella Miles Franklin: A Biography, the new biography of the author that took some 26 years to finish, is interviewed in "The Courier-Mail" by Christopher Bantick.
After the publication of My Brilliant Career in 1901, Franklin was compared in the Glasgow Herald with the Brontes. She left Australia in 1906 for America with several unpublished works in her luggage. She was a feminist and for a decade she worked for the women's labour movement in Chicago. For Roe, Franklin's independence and feminism underscored something else."What I find most admirable about her is her resilience. She just kept going. Writing is a disease and she did this while being fiercely independent. She was in the foreground of the first wave of feminism and she didn't take a step back as a person in anything.
"She left Australia for a long time and she did this for literary reasons. Miles wanted to see how she would be regarded abroad. She had the belief that she'd pull through but, even so, she took a risk leaving Australia and she wondered if she had made the right choices."
