Some of this material has been previously published, including in Drusilla Modjeska’s Exiles at Home: Australian Women Writers 1925–1945 (1981) and in Carole Ferrier’s wonderful collection of Australian women writers’ letters, As Good As a Yarn With You (1992). Roe herself edited Franklin’s letters, published in 1993 as My Congenials: Miles Franklin and Friends in Letters, while Paul Brunton edited The Diaries of Miles Franklin (2004). This biography is indeed a ‘life and times’, as distinct from a ‘life and works’; Roe writes with insight about Franklin’s fiction and does not neglect it, but she is an historian rather than a literary critic, and apart from a refreshing refusal of hagiography and a concomitantly realistic assessment of the virtues and limitations of Franklin’s fiction, she focuses for the most part on the act of writing within Franklin’s life and milieu, rather than on detailed analysis of the texts themselves. The reasons for the popularity and endurance of some of her books – My Brilliant Career (1901), All That Swagger (1936), Childhood at Brindabella (1963) – and the lesser or shorter-lived success of others, including her pseudonymous ‘Brent of Bin Bin’ series, emerge in these pages more from the passages quoted and the critical reactions at the time than from Roe’s own analysis.

In the first chapter, Roe quotes Franklin’s account of a ‘memorable experience’ from her childhood that her earlier biographer Marjorie Barnard (1967) also thought significant:

A big black snake lay full-length at his ease beside the water in the thin fringe of maidenhair ferns that were sprouting after winter retreat. The creature’s forked tongue flicked rapidly in and out, his new skin gleamed blue-black with peacock tints, a little of underside was showing like blended scarlet and pomegranate. I stood a fascinated moment … As I have sat in some great congress in one of the major cities, or in a famous concert hall, or eaten green almonds on a terrace in Turin in the early morning, or worked amid the din of the Krupp guns on an Eastern battle front, or watched the albatrosses in stormy weather off Cape Agulhas, or have been falling asleep in an attic in Bloomsbury, that snake has still been stretched in the ferns beside the creek, motionless except for the darting tongue.

This book is no psychobiography, and, in any case, most readers will be able to join the Freudian dots of this lush symbolism for themselves. More intriguing and mysterious is what this passage says about the nature of memory: for Franklin, the vision remains in the continuous present, confounding any notion that consciousness is chronological. Following Barnard’s suggestion that this was Franklin’s first ‘artistic experience’, Roe calls this ‘the memory of an ineffable moment’, saying that it ‘brings us to the threshold of the unknown in human experience’. It is as close as the biography comes to approaching any discussion of spirituality in Franklin’s life, but it is revealing that Roe should give it such prominence in the text, saying ‘the bush had transcendental powers for her as a child’.

In addition, the rather beautiful catalogue of life memories in this passage from Childhood at Brindabella suggests the breadth and complexity of Franklin’s own life experience. In her native country, she is mainly known for two things more than fifty years apart: the authorship of My Brilliant Career, a novel written while she was still in her teens, and the setting-up in her will of what is now known as the Miles Franklin Literary Award, first bestowed, three years after her death, on the inaugural winner, Patrick White, in 1957. (It was presented by Prime Minister Robert Menzies with the Leader of the Opposition in attendance, a scenario now barely imaginable.) In the usual Australian general knowledge of Franklin, the intervening half-century is relatively blank; this biography fills that gap generously, conscientiously and, occasionally, to the point of uncomfortable overstuffing with detail.

It is the story of a life full of travel, friendship, politics, work and writing, and it stands in sharp contrast to the usual trajectory and focus of a woman’s life in Franklin’s era: romance, marriage and motherhood, of which Franklin experienced the first but not the second or the third. While Roe returns repeatedly to the questions of love, sex, marriage, and reproduction in relation to Franklin’s life, her main focus is the same as her subject’s: politics, writing and work, not necessarily in that order.

All the same, some of the best sections of the book are those where Roe reflects on Franklin’s often incomprehensible (and perhaps incoherent) attitude to marriage, love and sex; in these matters, Roe seems to feel comparative freedom to muse and speculate, and from the historian’s point of view locates the issue in its various contexts, offering useful reminders about the tenets of first-wave feminism, the history of contraception, and the importance of ‘respectability’ to Franklin’s gender, generation, and class – material partly or wholly unfamiliar to many contemporary readers. Nonetheless, the occasional sly, wry aside makes its way into the writing: ‘By this time Miles was also against romance.’

In one of her life’s many internal contradictions, Franklin – best known for her passionate nationalism – spent half her life overseas, mostly in the United States and then the United Kingdom, and, for an adventurous six months during World War I, working in a field hospital in Macedonia. She left Australia in April 1906 at the age of twenty-six and did not come home for good until the end of 1932, not long after her fifty-second birthday.

This permanent return home is a natural hinge in Roe’s narrative and occurs halfway through the book; regarding the last two decades of Franklin’s life, there is simply more available material, fictional and otherwise, published and unpublished, to write about. But the book sheds valuable light on Franklin’s years away: on her years as the worker ‘Stella’ rather than the writer ‘Miles’, spent working in various roles – clerical, secretarial, financial and occasionally menial, the usual lot of the woman at work in the first half of the twentieth century – that had in common an ethos of service and support. Franklin worked in feminist and trade union organisations: in advocacy organisations and institutions for workers, women, the wounded and the inadequately housed. For these jobs she was at least paid, unlike the work she did in the family home in suburban Sydney whenever she returned to Australia, slipping into the default role of the single daughter and spinster aunt as she kept house and nursed, first for her elderly, cross-grained mother and then for her alcoholic nephew John, a casualty of the war.

Roe’s approach to the art of biography is traditional and straightforward: she is an empiricist historian and that is her methodology. The book is a magnificent feat of exhaustive research, but that in itself has one major disadvantage: the reader must plough through lists of meetings that Franklin went to, friends she visited, relatives with whom she corresponded and even, at one point, the specifications of the ship on which she sailed to America. While these catalogues go some way towards conveying the dense texture of Franklin’s life, there is too little summary and pulling-together of the details; every now and then the reader must simply stop, benumbed by facts. When Brian Matthews’s biography of Manning Clark was being reviewed late last year, at least two historians were harsh with him for not being enough of a historian; the biggest weakness of Roe’s book is that she is rather too much of one, and too seldom chances her arm in a passage of speculation, summary, analysis, or overview of the patterns in Franklin’s life and personality.

This is the more disappointing because when Roe does occasionally strike out into the choppy waters of speculation and opinion, she does it wonderfully well; her writing is like a quiet, friendly voice in the reader’s ear, with an occasional brilliant spark or glancing razor-swipe of wit. These passages occur more often towards the end of the book; as Roe moves into summary mode, she offers some sharply insightful comments on Franklin’s own self-construction and self-analysis while she was writing Childhood at Brindabella: ‘… Miles concluded that the “self” shaped by her enchanted world [of childhood] was ill prepared for life beyond its confines … through those selected memories she defines her “self” in such a way as to contain, even celebrate, inner contradictions, and to soothe her feelings of inadequacy.’ Roe’s level gaze at her subject wavers only twice: she seems deeply uncomfortable about the racism, common for its time and place, of Franklin’s attitude to ‘Asiatics’, and she is an apologist for the fact that Franklin often played fast and loose with the truth – ‘Her passion for secrecy is a real disease,’ wrote Dymphna Cusack in 1953 – though Roe does offer some very convincing reasons for the latter.

These authorial interventions are the more valuable because somehow the mass of material minutiae fails to spark any real sense of the person, and Franklin’s famous sprightliness seems somehow to self-negate when it is being written about. Perhaps Roe feels she must stick to the empirical evidence, but it is only when she cuts loose with musings and speculations of her own that Franklin comes fully to life in her account as a comprehensible human being, cut of whole cloth.

Bright glimpses of Franklin are also provided by judicious quotation of things said by her, to her or about her. In her role as anti-censorship campaigner in 1935, she asserted that, ‘If the world were made safe for fools, it would soon be fit for nothing else’. In similar aphoristic vein, she wrote of the Commonwealth Literary Fund that, ‘If they could blackball every writer that was what they would class as subversive or sacrilegious you would soon have nothing to collect but Hansard’; and she compared her indefatigable publicist to ‘a kelpie pup who will work chickens and ducks or children if no sheep are handy’. There are more revealing glimpses of her character in letters from loving friends: Dymphna Cusack wrote, ‘Our relationship has been of the greatest value in re-orienting me in my own country’, and Pixie O’Harris tried to express exactly what it was that made Franklin so loved by her many friends: ‘The personality … the soul, the staunch heart, the mixture of courage and timidity, the mixture of all that you are.’ Ray Mathew described her in 1952 as ‘a kind of combination of Mrs Pankhurst and Mary Poppins’.

Three decades ago, interest in Miles Franklin was increasing in the wake of second-wave feminism, a point Roe makes in detail in the final, elegiac chapter of this massive biography. That interest was given an extra boost by the success of the feature film My Brilliant Career (1979). But the annual bestowal of the Miles Franklin Literary Award is what keeps her name most regularly before the public eye, and it is still the prize that Australian novelists most value and want to win. The woman who emerges from these pages would have been deeply gratified – and even more astonished – to see how long-lived that legacy has been.