They were two erudite women - one Australian and one American - whose ideas and writings had a lasting impact on Australian society.
Stella ''Miles'' Franklin was a writer and feminist best known for her autobiographical novel My Brilliant Career, published in 1901.
Marion Mahony Griffin was an artist and architect, whose watercolour perspectives of her husband Walter's designs led to his plan winning the international design competition for what would become Canberra.
The two women were also friends, a little known fact that will be explored in a talk at the National Library tonight by Emeritus Professor Jill Roe, the author of a biography of Franklin.
In the second annual Marion Mahony Griffin lecture hosted by the Walter Burley Griffin Society, Professor Roe will focus on the association between the two women, their shared interests and what were to become their diverging values.
Speaking to The Canberra Times ahead of her talk this week, Professor Roe said records suggested that Franklin met the Griffins around 1911, possibly in Chicago or later in Sydney.
She said based on their similar ages and temperaments, it was not surprising that the two women hit it off and remained friends for the next three decades, although they were not often in the same city, or even the same country.
Franklin spent much time with the Griffins at Castlecrag, the experimental Sydney suburb that became a progressive community in the interwar years.
The two women grew apart by the late 1930s, as their political views no longer converged.
Griffin became a devotee of Rudolf Steiner, and his movement known as Anthroposophy, ''a complex and essentially spiritualised approach to political change'', and Franklin did not sympathise with these views.
Professor Jill Roe will present Marion, Miles and the Magic of America at 6pm tonight at the National Library of Australia Theatre. Entry is free.
For more on this story, see the print edition of today's Canberra Times.
Source: The Canberra Times
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