‘Early Flower’ Meets ‘Petted Lion’: The New Woman and New Man in Miles Franklin’s ‘Lost’ Novel, The Net of Circumstance

Abstract

By actively contesting and challenging dominant definitions of gender and their prescribed social and familial roles, Stella Miles Franklin’s ‘lost’ novel, The Net of Circumstance, announces itself as a realist New Woman protest novel geared to participate in critical cultural debates about the gendered practices of marriage and the inadequacies of American manhood. The author makes the case for this novel as a historically contingent text that attends to the material specificities of Franklin’s negotiation with both the literary/aesthetic and socio-economic/interpersonal issues of her time. She argues for its representation of continuities between late-Victorian and modernist literary genres that include the containment of unfamiliar stories about female empowerment and the self-serving politics of pro-feminist male allies in the familiar space of courtship and marriage.

Keywords:

• Miles Franklin
• New Woman
• feminism
• Victorian realism
• literary modernism

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Franklin’s pocket diary (ML/MSS 364/2, Reel CY 2153) is located in the Franklin Archives at the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales, Sydney.

2 During this time, Franklin also worked on three other novels: ‘The Business of Cupid’, which would become the unpublished manuscript ‘When Cupid Tarried’; a ‘Sybil Story’ (most likely the novel On Dearborn Street, published posthumously by the University of Queensland Press in 1981); and a manuscript that was later published in 1946 by Georgian House as My Career Goes Bung.

3 Pocket diary, 13 September, 16 September, 7 December, 20 December and 21 December 1911.

4 Pocket diary, 22 November 1911.

5 Pocket diary, 12 November 1911.

6 ‘Dreadful piano banger overhead’, wrote Franklin in her diary on 28 March 1910 and, a week later, on 7 April: ‘worn out by piano din overhead’.

7 Pocket diary, 13 September and 9 October 1911.

8 Pocket diary, 4 November 1911.

9 Pocket diary, 12 September, 19 September and 13 November 1912.

10 Pocket diary, 12 December 1911.

11 Pocket diary, 28 July, 16 July, 4 August and 6 August 1909.