“A meaningful freedom” : women, work and the promise of modernity in a reading of the letters of Raden Adjeng Kartini (Java) alongside Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (Australia)

Raden Adjeng Kartini (1879-1904) and Stella Miles Franklin (1879-1954) were contemporaries. They were born in 1879-Kartini in Java in what was then the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia) and Miles Franklin in the Monaro region of New South Wales, Australia. They did not share a common language-I doubt they ever even heard of each other-but at the end of the nineteenth century they both blazed a path of resistance against the expectations of their respective societies that they would marry, have a family, and live lives dependent upon a husband. Although just twenty-one at the turn of the century, both dreamed of a career and the social and economic freedom to make meaningful life choices on their own terms. Both saw leaving their homelands as offering the possibility of making their dreams a reality.