The title of this book about Franklin’s Chicago years, Fallen Among Reformers, sounds as if it will confirm the heroine’s complaint, in Cockatoos (1954), that ‘for an artist to fall among reformers is more fatal than for a merchant to fall among bandits’, robbed of the means to pursue her art. Such a split was the main theme of Verna Coleman’s book, Miles Franklin in America: Her unknown (brilliant) career (1981). But Janet Lee’s study of the writing that Franklin did during those years confirms the judgement of her biographer, Jill Roe, that for Miles Franklin Chicago was her university. Lee shows that these new experiences fed into her writing and extended its scope.

Portrait of Miles Franklin, c.1940s (photograph via Wikimedia Commons)

Chicago was America’s second city, with a population of some two million and a reputation for expanding industries exploiting immigrant labour. Franklin’s work ranged from supporting the notorious Chicago garment workers strike in 1910–11 to attending labour and feminist conventions in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. She made a wide circle of friends in progressive politics. Along with philanthropists like Robins and Jane Addams, founder of the famous social settlement at Hull House, and the Lloyd brothers (with both of whom she had major flirtations), she met eminent international feminists like Charlotte Perkins Gilman, the Pankhursts, Emma Goldman, and Alexandra Kollontai, as well as unionists and social scientists and Christian Scientists. The Windy City was also famed for its progressive literature and theatre – think Theodore Dreiser, Upton Sinclair, and Willa Cather, among others.

Despite her busy work and social life in Chicago, Franklin wrote a great deal – not only the journalism that appeared in Life and Labour and in various Australian papers but also five novels and a number of unpublished plays and short stories, all set in America. Only two of the novels were published: The Net of Circumstance appeared in 1915 under the bizarre pseudonym of ‘Mr and Mrs Ogniblat l’Artsau’ (Austral Talbingo) from the then-new house of Mills & Boon, and disappeared with scarcely a trace; On Dearborn Street, rejected by Mills & Boon in 1915, did not see the light of day until 1981, when UQP rescued it.

Lee describes all this material, arranging it by three themes: work, marriage, and men. It is a labour of love, especially as there is little chance of building critical conversations about work that has never been published. She uses the biographical context meticulously, giving due credit to Roe’s groundbreaking work. As for the context of ideas, there is discussion of early twentieth-century feminist debates on how marriage should be transformed (noting Franklin’s disapproval of free love as a solution) and of the importance of Gilman’s Women and Economics for Franklin’s approach to reforming women’s work.

As well as the context of contemporary feminist ideas, there is the matter of the literary contexts within which Franklin was writing. Lee claims that her book ‘highlights Franklin as a socially engaged fictional polemicist who took the modern world of urban Chicago as her subject and employed the romance tradition to dramatize the effects of sexism and misogyny on women’s lives’. This aspect of her study is less convincing. She has virtually nothing to say about American New Woman stories of the period, of which there were many, including male-authored classics like Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900), as well as novels by Willa Cather, Ellen Glasgow, Kathleen Norris, Edna Ferber and others. As for the claim that ‘Franklin’s feminist realist approach’ managed to ‘bridge’ the romantic conventions of Victorian women’s fiction and modern critical realism, there is insufficient literary analysis to demonstrate this, despite a plethora of footnote references to the critical literature on (British) New Woman fiction.

In Laughter, Not for a Cage (1956), Franklin unjustly dismissed her Australian predecessors like Rosa Praed and Ada Cambridge for writing mere ‘lending-library romances’. Her own idiosyncratic mix of the romantic and the satirical was probably her undoing when it came to finding publishers – that, and her weird and wonderful pseudonyms. If the style of On Dearborn Street is any indication – and that is the only one of these Chicago works I have been able to read – it seems that Franklin allowed herself to run riot, revelling in American (‘Merkan’) idioms and satirising the romantic ideas of the male narrator, the ‘hero’ who writes his ‘memoirs of an infatuate, satirically and gleefully offered … running amok in the vernacular’.

Perhaps Franklin did not try very hard to get the Chicago stories published, or the plays produced. But it would be great to have access now to The Net of Circumstance, the story of a modern independent woman, which sounds like the best of them. Perhaps Text Classics would do the honours and rescue it from ‘Mr and Mrs Ogniblat l’Artsau’ and Mills & Boon?