It is very many years since I first read this book, and I had remembered it with great affection, I knew I had loved it back then, but to be honest I hadn’t remembered anything of the story. Ausreading month was therefore the perfect excuse to re-read this classic – I now think I’ll have to re-read the sequel in the not too distant future. Earlier in the month I read Ada Cambridge’s The Three Miss Kings – which I really enjoyed. The two novels were written only a decade apart – and the stories take place within about fifteen years or so of each other. While Ada Cambridge’s novel portrays the modern vibrant society of late nineteenth century Melbourne, Miles Franklin’s famous novel has a more rural setting, and a society of an altogether different type. “Our new house was a ten-roomed wooden structure, built on a barren hillside. Crooked stunted gums and stringybarks, with a thick underscrub of wild cherry, hop, and hybrid wattle, clothed the spurs which ran up from the back of the detached kitchen. Away from the front of the house were flats, bearing evidence of cultivation, but a drop of water was nowhere to be seen. Later, we discovered a few round, deep, weedy waterholes down on the flat, which in rainy weather swelled to a stream which swept all before it. Possum Gully is one of the best watered spots in the district, and in that respect has stood to its guns in the bitterest drought”Sybylla Melvyn is fifteen as the novel opens – living with her family in the outback of the 1890’s. Sybylla loves the wild outback landscape of Possum Gully – but hates the realities and constraints that the life has placed upon her. She is the eldest child of a disappointed mother and a useless father, longs for books, music and to do great things – to have a brilliant career as a writer. Sybylla is beset with self-doubt – declaring herself ugly; she feels unloved and misunderstood by her family. Sybylla’s mother comes from a much more genteel family – her grandmother and aunt live on the large rural property of Caddagat. Sybylla is ecstatic when her grandmother whisks her away to live with her and her Aunt Helen at Caddagat – a place of books, music and gentility. Near neighbours and good friends are the Misses Beecham – and their adored nephew Harold Beecham, a rich, handsome and eminently eligible bachelor who has already caught the eye of many a single girl. Sybylla is impetuous, flying quickly into unthinking tempers; she enjoys nothing better than a sparring contest with an arrogant male. Much to her bemusement Sybylla captivates the handsome Harold Beecham. “Our greatest heart-treasure is a knowledge that there is in creation an individual to whom our existence is necessary - some one who is part of our life as we are part of theirs, some one in whose life we feel assured our death would leave a gap for a day or two.”As Sybylla and Harold become closer, Harold’s business runs into trouble, and a letter arrives from Sybylla’s mother informing her daughter that she must go as a governess to the M’Swat family at Barney’s Gap in payment of a debt. The M’Swat family is a rough chaotic family living in a slovenly dirty house. To Sybylla leaving Caddagat, her grannie and Aunt Helen is grief enough, but to have to live amongst such people is a horror to her. Typically it is only when leaving Barney’s Gap after a bout of illness that the wild and impetuous Sybylla begins to see some of the worth in these hardworking good natured people. Sybylla returns to her parent’s home, to her younger brother and sisters, and the relentless grind of life at Possum Gully – and her younger prettier sister is sent to Caddagat in her place. When news comes of Harold Beecham’s return to his old home, his fortunes revived again, Sybylla must decide between consenting to a conventional life or to hold fast to her dreams. It is astonishing to think that Miles Franklin was only sixteen when she wrote this highly autobiographical novel; it is quite an achievement, although it is perfectly possible to see the young girl behind the words. My Brilliant Career is shot through with the romantic impetuosity and wild extravagancies of a young girl - often irreverent, dramatic even self-pitying – Sybylla is like so many girls of her age both now and then, young girls don’t change so very much after all do they?
Fictionalised autobiographical turn-of-last-century Australian bush classic. Sybilla spends most of her youth in the soul-sapping drudgery of dairying in a drought-stricken country. Her soul cries out for two unreachable worlds: the wild bush country of the remote ranch of her childhood, and the sophisticated world of arts, culture, literature and conversation belonging to distant cities such as Sydney. She knows, though, that be she ever so brilliant, the career she longs for will never be hers - being a woman prevents her from even seeking it, as an equally poor man might do. Then she receives an unlooked-for escape when her grandmother and aunt invite her to stay with them out on their ranch in the rugged and beautiful bushland she grew up in. But even there she feels the conflict between what she could do and what her spirit yearns for; especially when it comes to the matters of love and marriage.I honestly can't tell whether I enjoyed this or not. There were definitely times it was a trudge and I was measuring how many pages I had to go and whether I could bear to get through them, but other times I was hooked. Sybilla is always an obnoxious, conceited, self-conscious and frustrating narrator, but she does know that she's these things, and it feels as though she's always trying to break through the prison of her own eloquence and awkwardness, to express what she really means, but never quite making it. And for all her self-pitying conceit, she's right: she does belong in a different sphere to the one she's trapped in, and the sheer misery it causes her to be cut off from what she yearns for strikes a powerful chord.The most intriguing part of the book is her attitude to marriage. I'd heard that (view spoiler)[this was a book in which the heroine chose her career over marriage, but that's not what happens. The reasons she chooses not to marry are confused and contradictory, but almost more convincing as a result. More real? She is very young, and Miles Franklin was very young when she wrote this, and trying to work out why the idea of love and sex repel more than they attract you is pretty damned confusing. So Sybilla can talk about how her soul recoils from the very thought of marriage and her instinctive response to touch is to strike out, and then in the same breath she can talk about how the reason she doesn't want to marry this man, the one she thinks she might love, is because he's just not masterful enough, and somewhere out there is the true masterful man who would make her love him.Seeing the way she sabotages and boxes herself in is painful, all the same. It's only knowing the success Miles Franklin achieved that makes that ending for her fictional self less crushing. (hide spoiler)]
Do You like book My Brilliant Career (2006)?
My Brilliant Career is sort of what would happen if Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and the Australian outback and first-wave feminism had a baby.Miles Franklin, though. Stella Marie Sarah Miles Franklin. She struggled for so long to get this book published - it was a success of sorts in the end, but she was so sick of it, she took it off the market and wanted it published again only after she died.I wasn't ready to warm to this book - it's quite thick, and I had to read it for a course. But I loved it. It grew on me. Sybylla is a headstrong heroine who can be a little bit irritating, but after a while, I had only absolute affection towards her.This book, written when Franklin was only a teenager, is a beautiful masterpiece. It's full of early feminist thought and ideas, and although I don't like all the parts of the book, together, as a whole, I love it.I love the descriptions of the landscape, the stark sunrises, the ring-barked trees.This book, in all its humble existence, is one of the unsung heroes of early Australian literature and feminism. I'll continue to be its champion till the day I die.Doesn't matter if you don't love this book, Stella Marie Miles Franklin, because I do.
—Lydia
I read this for year 12 English, so my memories of it are both vague and tainted by the fact that I had to dissect the book. End result though: I still love it.When I started the book, I found it very difficult to get in to. The protagonist just seemed to be a whining, demanding, annoying excuse for a human being. It's really tough to keep reading when you start to hate the character telling the story. In fact, I recall a "first impressions" essay I wrote after reading very little of the book where I said pretty much exactly that. I hated it. I even considered dropping English altogether. I really did not want to read another word.But I was forced to go on, and I'm glad for that because the book was actually incredibly good. Without giving away any spoilers, the protagonist becomes far less annoying and evolves into someone you can really feel for. Just keep reading. This book will reward you for it.
—Angela Alcorn
Miles Franklin - Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin - is probably Australia's most revered female writer. "My Brilliant Career" is her very first book, published in 1901 when she was barely 21. It was hugely successful, but she eventually withdrew it from publication until after her death, because it upset her that so many people believed it to be autobiographical. It probably was so, but like most new writers, she perhaps didn't think others would make the connections.It's a passionate book, both about life and love, and about the Australian bush. The heroine, Sybylla Melvyn, is probably as boisterous and passionate as Franklin was herself. The writing is of its time - it's wordy and descriptive, often overblown by today's preferences, but the fierceness with which she loves the country and its people carries the novel through. Sometimes I wanted to slap Sybylla - often in fact! - but she was a girl on a mission - her own life - and nothing was going to stop her. Not even the perfect man, when he appeared on the horizon. She was an early Australian feminist.Miles Franklin went on to write another seven novels under her name, and seven more as "Brent of Bin Bin", in an effort to hide her identity. She also wrote several non-fiction books.It's a masterfully written book by such a young first time writer, especially for its time. But you need to be prepared for long wordy, reflective passages. Just go with it.It almost seems cheeky to give it a rating - so I'll just go with 5.
—Joanne
