[1] During this period she was encouraged in her writing by her teacher, Mary Gillespie (1856–1938) and Tom Hebblewhite (1857–1923) editor of the local Goulburn newspaper.

[5] Her best known novel, My Brilliant Career, tells the story of an irrepressible teenage girl, Sybylla Melvyn, growing to womanhood in rural New South Wales.

Whilst doing this she contributed pieces to The Daily Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald under the pseudonyms "An Old Bachelor" and "Vernacular."

[1] Her years in the US are reflected in On Dearborn Street (not published until 1981), a love story that uses American slang in a manner not dissimilar to the early work of Dashiell Hammett.

Also while in America she wrote Some Everyday Folk and Dawn (1909), the story of a small-town Australian family, which uses purple prose for deliberate comic effect.

She suffered regular bouts of ill health and entered a sanatorium for a period in 1912[5] In 1915, she travelled to England and worked as a cook and earned some money from journalism.

[5] In March 1917 Franklin volunteered for war work in the Ostrovo Unit of the Scottish Women's Hospitals during the Serbian campaigns of 1917–18.

She served as a cook and later matron's orderly in a 200-bed tent hospital attached to the Serbian army near Lake Ostrovo in Macedonian Greece from July 1917 to February 1918.

Will think my own thoughts and write a book if the plot comes into my head.From 1919 to 1926 Franklin worked as Secretary with the National Housing and Town Planning Association in London.

[11] Her life in England in the 1920s gave rise to Bring the Monkey (1933), a satire on the English country house mystery novel.

She encouraged young writers such as Jean Devanny, Sumner Locke Elliott and Ric Throssell and she supported the new literary journals, Meanjin and Southerly.

[7] Dever writes that the letters between Dymphna Cusack and Miles Franklin that are published in Yarn Spinners[19] "provide a see-sawing commentary on the delicate art of literary collaboration".

[12] A revival of interest in Franklin occurred in the wake of the Australian New Wave film My Brilliant Career (1979), which won several international awards.