Three Brilliant Careers
$32.99
Ross Davies
This book reveals the previously untold story of celebrated author Miles Franklin and two lifelong Australian friends, Nell Malone and Kath Ussher, who met in Chicago in 1914 and reunited a year later in war-torn London.
Despite facing enormous risks, the women subsequently travelled to the Balkans with the Scottish Women’s Hospitals and served in frontline medical units attached to the French and Serbian Armies.
After the war, Miles settled in London, Kath in Hollywood and Nell in Paris, but maintained their friendship through regular correspondence. All three achieved distinction in their chosen fields, although not without encountering significant obstacles in their path.
Bridging four decades across several continents, Three Brilliant Careers follows the remarkable lives of the friends, and explores their crossed destinies to tell an inspirational story of Australia’s early feminists.
Additional information
| Weight | 560 g |
|---|---|
| Dimensions | 230 × 150 × 13 mm |
| ISBN | 9781925046823 |
| Format | |
| Page extent | 296 |
| Publication Year | 2015 |
| Subject | Biography & Autobiography |
| Imprint | Boolarong Press |
| ebook | Available through Kindle Store, Google Books, iBooks, Kobo |
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Miles Franklin is a firmly established figure in Australia’s literary and cultural history. Not so Kath Ussher and Nell Malone. History is unkind. Ross Davies charts and celebrates their extraordinary lives over the years in Europe, America and Australia through tumultuous times, especially World War I. Ussher continually re-invented herself over her long life. Malone became involved in a great French scandal in the 1920s, and “SMiles”, through considerable ups and downs, eventually assumed an enduring place in our cultural legacy.
Steven Carroll (former winner of The Prime Minister’s Literary Award) – Review published in both The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
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Three Brilliant Careers is a work of sound scholarship and considerable imagination… This is mostly a matter of a discerning eye both for anecdote and the historical events that constrained and enabled the women’s working lives.
Among its other virtues, Davies’ book intelligently supplements and complicates our understanding of Australians, women and not only writers, who – bravely and essentially alone – made their ways abroad.
Peter Pierce (editor of The Cambridge History of Australian Literature) – published in The Weekend Australian Review
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It was a chance family connection that led Brisbane author Ross Davies on a journey uncovering the lives of three unique Australian women. What unfolded was an incredible story about a friendship that spanned continents and lasted for more than 40 years.
Nell Malone, Miles Franklin and Kath Ussher were way ahead of their time and Davies pays tribute to them in this fascinating book about three feminist icons.
Sally Browne – published in The Courier Mail
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Miles Franklin’s papers showed that her life and that of Nell Malone and Kath Ussher were so intertwined that Ross Davies decided that this was the story he wanted to tell. All three had left Australia determined to pursue careers, much like the heroine of Miles Franklin’s famous novel, My Brilliant Career, and they succeeded in this resolution.
Jennifer Somerville – published in Good Reading Magazine
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Three Brilliant Careers reveals the unconventional life of Nell Malone, an early twentieth century Charters Tower’s woman. Alongside Miles Franklin and Kath Ussher ‘these trailblazing Australians dared to turn their backs on traditional roles for women and demanded an equal place in the world’.
Morgan Oss – published in The Northern Miner (Charters Towers)