AustLit

'Miles Franklin, as many scholars have suggested, was an inherently contradictory personality. Friends and colleagues have represented her as someone who rarely disclosed her private life. Marjory Barnard highlighted Franklin's privacy when she wrote in her biography of Franklin: 'Who knows exactly what Miles felt - even when she told you?' (1967, 49). In her collection of Australian women writers' diaries and letters from this era, Carole Ferrier writes: 'Franklin does not generally reveal a great deal about her personal life in her letters' (1992, 6). Jill Roe describes her as 'self-protective to a degree people still find incomprehensible' (2008, 345). This article has been developed from a larger project that set out to explore 'the dynamics of her interior life' (Roe 2004, 44) as expressed in Franklin'd manuscript diaries, held at the Mitchell Library in Sydney.' (p63)