Some Everyday Folk and Dawn

The women's suffrage movement has arrived in the small town of Noonoon in 1904, and the male residents are reacting with all the grace of men who've just been told the sky is falling. But for Dawn Clay, the real battle is closer to home. She's young, lively, and utterly unwilling to be auctioned off in what her grandmother optimistically calls "the marriage market." Dawn wants the stage. She wants a career. She wants to be something other than someone's wife. Miles Franklin, who wrote her masterpiece My Brilliant Career at just twenty-one, returns to the question that made her famous: what happens to a woman with fire in her when the world insists she simmers? Sharp, funny, and quietly furious, this is a portrait of ambition trapped in corsets and convention, and of one small town learning (slowly, painfully) that the future is coming whether it likes it or not.