AustLit

This essay examines Rosa Praed's communication 'through letters, agreements, publisher's ledgers, and memoirs of her dealings with one of her early publishers, George Bentley of Richard Bentley & Son. These dealings were essentially professional and financial, but they were also educative and personal. George Bentley was one of several male mentors during Praed's first decade of publishing, but the only one who was both mentor and publisher....' (108)

'Stella Miles Franklin did not want readers of her novel My Brilliant Career to assume that its author was a woman. She wrote to its publishers, asking for the 'Miss' to be removed: she intended readers to believe it to be written by 'a bald-headed seer of the sterner sex'. When Henry Lawson first read it he was flummoxed by the gender of the author. He wrote to Franklin, asking her: 'Will you write and tell me what your really are? Man or woman?' This confusion is nowhere apparent in the preface he wrote for the novel's publication in 1901...' (Introduction, p 32)