My Brilliant Career

My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin, 1901

Straight from writing about Holden Caulfield I finished reading about another wonderfully realised teen character from another time and halfway around the world. Sybylla Penelope Melvin.

Franklin’s turn of the (last) century novel is a classic, and rightly so. This short semi-autobiographical coming of age tale was a best seller, both in Australia, and back in England, but the scandal it generated caused Franklin to request that it not be published again until after her death.

I picked up this book as part of Meanjin Tournament of Books late last year, and am pleased that it will be the first of my reviews for the Australian Women Writers Challenge.

Sybylla is a cocky teenage girl, all slang and rebellion. She is stubborn, intelligent, and uncompromising. When her impoverished farmer parents can no longer afford to maintain their ever expanding brood she is shipped off to her grandmother’s at Caddagat to live in relative middle class comfort. It is here she meets, and is fallen in love with by, Harold Beecham.

A life of relative married ease is not however part of Sybylla’s ambitions.

Girls! girls! Those of you who have hearts, and therefore a wish for happiness, homes, and husbands by and by, never develop a reputation of being clever. It will put you out of the matrimonial running as effectually as though it had been circulated that you had leprosy… A plain woman will have nothing forgiven her. Her fate is such that the parents of uncomely female infants should be compelled to put them to death at their birth.

This is not an Austenesque romance tale, in which after much trial and tribulation, the precocious young lady finally marries into love and comfort. Sybylla’s bravery in turning down her suitor, in refusing to compromise, is heart breaking. She refuses a life of relative ease with Harold to remain with her unloving mother, in the monotony and grind of their poverty.

It is not marriage that is Sybylla’s crowning achievement, the act which secures her place as one of the most compelling of Australian heroines, but her refusal to be anyone but herself, and that self is a writer, not a wife. The book ends with her writing her masterpiece, that we know, even if Sybylla does not, will be an enduring classic of the Australian literary canon.

This book is also notable for its stunning descriptions of the Australian landscape, and turn of the century rural life:

A few light, wind-smitten clouds made wan streaks across the white sky, haggard with the fierce, relentless glare of the afternoon sun. Weariness was written across my mother’s delicate careworn features, and found expression in my father’s knitted brows and dusty face. Blackshaw was weary, and said so as he wiped the dust, made mud with perspiration, off his cheeks. I was weary – my limbs ached with the heat and work. The poor beast stretched at our feet was weary. All nature was weary, and seemed to sing a dirge to that effect in the furnace-breath wind which roared among the trees on the low ranges at our back and smote the parched and thirsty ground. All were weary, all but the sun. He seemed to glory in his power, relentless and untiring, as he swung boldly in the sky, triumphantly leering down upon his helpless victims.

Franklin brings to life the heat and dust, the strain and hardship of the 1890s drought and recession. While her descriptions can tend to the parochial they are not mawkish or overblown.

This is a passionate and precocious book, but most of all is Franklin’s brutal honesty and stunning bravery that strikes me most. This is a book that deserves to be read, and I’m embarrassed to admit that it took me so long to do so.

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