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An excerpt from The Speaker, the Liberal Review, Volume 4:
My Brilliant Career is something very different from a good readable novel. Strictly speaking, it is hardly a novel at all. “There is no plot in this story," runs the introduction, “because there has been none in my life or in any other life which has come under my notice.” We can scarcely tell from it whether “Miles Franklin ” will ever write a good novel, though we have no doubt that her literary career will be an interesting one. We confidently fear, however that she will never write such another book as My Brilliant Career. Once or twice in the world's history the sphinx, woman, has given us a partial answer to the great riddle of sex. This is one of the occasions. We care comparatively little for "the descriptions of Bush life and scenery.” We can get those in ship-loads like Australian mutton. What has stirred us strangely are “the pitiably emotional parts of the book,” which Mr. Lawson unkindly “leaves to girl readers to judge.” As if they would judge fairly! We fancy them, in politer language, delivering the sentiment of Sybyllal's mother: “In time a perfect she-devil.”
This story of the restless aspiration of an artistic girl in the uncongenial surroundings of a poverty-stricken dairy farm, and in still less congenial surroundings as governess to the children of a money-grabbing farmer, with a short interlude of happiness to deepen her misery in the refined home of her grandmother, is a human document indeed, if there is any meaning at all left in that hardly-used phrase. Sybylla Marion is a living breathing character, and her surroundings receive their actuality from this fact. We see them with her eyes, and feel their reaction on her sensitive, receptive nature. Her drunken father, her mother turned a shrew through poverty, her correct grandmother, the outrageous McSwats, the hobbledehoy Hawden, even her lover, the inevitable strong man (the latter, we admit, least of all, forthe ideal goes to his making up), are real to us because they are real to her. For all the sardonic title and the bitterness of the introduction—“Oh! how I hate this living death which has swathed all my teens"—we did not find My Brilliant Career at all dismal reading. Under the discontent of the unrecognised and misunderstood artist, which is described with all the hopelessness of youth and the terrible discomfort of poverty, such as fell to the lot of the Marians, there is an exuberance of spirit, a sunniness of disposition, that is irrepressible, and radiates its warmth through the whole book.
My Brilliant Career is something very different from a good readable novel. Strictly speaking, it is hardly a novel at all. “There is no plot in this story," runs the introduction, “because there has been none in my life or in any other life which has come under my notice.” We can scarcely tell from it whether “Miles Franklin ” will ever write a good novel, though we have no doubt that her literary career will be an interesting one. We confidently fear, however that she will never write such another book as My Brilliant Career. Once or twice in the world's history the sphinx, woman, has given us a partial answer to the great riddle of sex. This is one of the occasions. We care comparatively little for "the descriptions of Bush life and scenery.” We can get those in ship-loads like Australian mutton. What has stirred us strangely are “the pitiably emotional parts of the book,” which Mr. Lawson unkindly “leaves to girl readers to judge.” As if they would judge fairly! We fancy them, in politer language, delivering the sentiment of Sybyllal's mother: “In time a perfect she-devil.”
This story of the restless aspiration of an artistic girl in the uncongenial surroundings of a poverty-stricken dairy farm, and in still less congenial surroundings as governess to the children of a money-grabbing farmer, with a short interlude of happiness to deepen her misery in the refined home of her grandmother, is a human document indeed, if there is any meaning at all left in that hardly-used phrase. Sybylla Marion is a living breathing character, and her surroundings receive their actuality from this fact. We see them with her eyes, and feel their reaction on her sensitive, receptive nature. Her drunken father, her mother turned a shrew through poverty, her correct grandmother, the outrageous McSwats, the hobbledehoy Hawden, even her lover, the inevitable strong man (the latter, we admit, least of all, forthe ideal goes to his making up), are real to us because they are real to her. For all the sardonic title and the bitterness of the introduction—“Oh! how I hate this living death which has swathed all my teens"—we did not find My Brilliant Career at all dismal reading. Under the discontent of the unrecognised and misunderstood artist, which is described with all the hopelessness of youth and the terrible discomfort of poverty, such as fell to the lot of the Marians, there is an exuberance of spirit, a sunniness of disposition, that is irrepressible, and radiates its warmth through the whole book.
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Book Description:
*The story of a young girl's dreams, aspirations and melodramas told with zest and verve by the 16-year-old author
About the Author:
Stella Miles Franklin was born in the Australian bush in 1879. By the age of twenty, Miles Franklin had completed her first novel, My Brilliant Career. After it was rejected by local publishers, she sent it to Henry Lawson, who called it 'the first great Australian novel'. He wrote a preface for it and helped her to get it published in Britain in 1901. The sequel, My Career Goes Bung, was written in 1900 but was not published until 1946, considered too audacious and perhaps too revealing of its creator's own persona for publication. Miles' early success gave her entree to literary and socialist circles in Sydney and Melbourne. By 1906 she decided to travel overseas, and went to work for the women's labour movement in Chicago. In 1915 she relocated to London and worked for various feminist and progressive causes, all the while continuing to write. A prolific author of plays as well as novels and archetypal bush stories, she often submitted work under pseudonyms that she guarded fiercely all her life. In the 1930s she returned to Australia and determined to take up the cause of Australian writing and writers. Her endowment of the Miles Franklin literary award not only surprised all who knew her, but founded an Australian literary institution that remains our most prestigious.
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- PublisherCreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform
- Publication date2011
- ISBN 10 1463726333
- ISBN 13 9781463726331
- BindingPaperback
- Number of pages252
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My Brilliant Career
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ISBN 10: 1463726333
ISBN 13: 9781463726331
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