Some Everyday Folk and Dawn

Set in the fictional New South Wales town of Noonoon soon after Australian women won the vote, this 1909 novel follows daily life in and around a riverside boarding house run on strict temperance lines by the shrewd, plain-spoken Grandma Clay. Her granddaughter Dawn, bright and headstrong, comes of age as a local election pits a self-styled “women’s” candidate against a “men’s” candidate, and as a courtship with the young athlete Ernest Breslow forces her to weigh what she wants from marriage. Franklin treats the new female franchise as ordinary civic business rather than spectacle, insisting that women are citizens in their own right. Wry, closely observed, and firmly Australian in voice, it reads at once as a small-town comedy of manners and an early feminist novel.