In Disguise

After the success of her debut novel My Brilliant Career, Australian writer Miles Franklin faced a familiar problem: how to write her next book and what should it be about? Her UK publisher was not keen on her ideas and so she turned to journalism and went undercover to write an exposé of the life of a domestic servant.

It was a revelation to her and to her readers: the behaviour of her employers, the exhaustion, the injuries in the course of a working day, the lack of time off, all of this written about by a spy in various well-heeled homes.

Then Miles‘ radical spirit went further and she took off for America, where she joined a network of feminist reformers.

In Miles Franklin Undercover, scholar and journalist Kerrie Davies draws on a wealth of primary sources to get inside the mind of one of the most significant and unconventional writers in Australian literary history.

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