The Face of the Australian Girl in Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) and Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (1944)

Abstract Modernist Australian women’s fiction explores varying degrees of social and political radicalism, especially in relation to the conventional marriage plot. Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) and Christina Stead’s For Love Alone (1944) feature heroines who defy traditional expectations about women’s desire for heterosexual romance and a happy marriage as the formal mark of narrative closure in the novel. The two women are also repeatedly characterised as physically unattractive, especially in their faces, which are frequently remarked upon by their families, friends and even strangers. Franklin’s first-person narrative is driven by Sybylla’s colloquial expressions and her passionate desire for emotional independence but its mode of representation is predominantly realist. In contrast, Stead’s novel experiments with some of the representational paradoxes and ambiguities associated with modernist innovation; and culminates in a melodramatic scene of facial recognition and misrecognition that resists interpretative closure.