Novel
My Brilliant Career
Miles Franklin · 1901
Opening lines
MY DEAR FELLOW AUSTRALIANS,
Just a few lines to tell you that this story is all about myself—for no other purpose do I write it.
Text quoted from gutenberg.net.au
Synopsis
Sybylla Melvyn, the eldest in a family of graziers, watches her father make one bad deal after another and start to drink; the family ends up on a poor farm, Possum Gully, near Goulburn. Her grandmother invites her to Caddagat, her mother's childhood home, where she finds books, music and a refined life, and where a rich neighbouring landowner, Harold Beecham, courts her. When money runs short again, her mother places her as a governess with the M'Swats, a coarse family. She dreams of writing and distrusts the conventions of marriage.
Context
Written in a few months, in the evenings, after the farm work, and refused by Australian publishers in 1899, the book appeared in April 1901 in Edinburgh from William Blackwood, thanks to Henry Lawson, whose preface revealed that the author was a woman. The publisher had removed the question mark from the intended title, which weakened its irony, and many read it as an autobiography; according to Jill Roe, its reception in Goulburn revealed class tensions. According to the National Museum of Australia, the author withdrew it from sale in 1910, having hardly been paid for it; it reappeared only in the sixties, and Gillian Armstrong made a film from it in 1979.
Who it is for
A first-person novel, lively and ironic; Nelly Lhermillier's French translation is easy to find.
Prizes and reception
A. G. Stephens hailed it as a warmly rendered Australian life; feminist criticism took it up in the late seventies.
Sources for this page 7
The pages consulted to check this page.