Book One: My Brilliant Career – Miles Franklin
You know a book is great when you can’t put it down, but you know it’s a classic when even after you turn the last page it continues to linger in your thoughts. A book most deserving of this praise is My Brilliant Career written by Miles Franklin and published in 1901. The author was just twenty years old.
For those unaware, as I was when I began reading this book, Miles Franklin was a female. Her full name was Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin and she wrote a great deal of highly praised novels before her death in 1954. To this day she remains an Australian literary icon and her presence is felt in the continuing existence of the Miles Franklin Literary Award . In 2011, this offered a prize of $50,000 to the novel that best illustrated Australian life and was of the highest literary merit.
There is no doubt that My Brilliant Career offers readers anything less than a high standard of authorship and it most definitely encompasses Australian life – or so it was back then. The novel presents a story about a fiercely passionate young girl named Sybylla who is born to a family of eight living in the New South Wales outback. Sybylla dreams of books, music and building a career in the arts but her daily reality is of milking cows and suffering the hardship of an alcoholic father who has squandered their fortune in drink.
The bleary dullness of a life of hard labour stretches before Sybylla although the novel, which reads like a diary, is anything but. The descriptions of the landscape provoked such vivid images in my mind that I truly felt as though I could feel the wrenching heat on my shoulders and see the haze in the air. The acuity of speech didn’t stop at the scenery but existed in all parts of the story – conversations, events and even the inner thoughts of Sybylla herself.
That is perhaps the most remarkable part about this novel – the honesty of Sybylla. When her disobedience at home leads her mother to send her away to the family estate to be put under the care of her grandmother and aunt, the most beautifully put paragraphs evolve. During her time at Caddagat, Sybylla is exposed to everything she has ever dreamt about, including the things she didn’t think she cared for like beauty and men. In a short period she changes from the unruly discontent teenager she was with her parents into a flamboyant happy girl that nobody can help but like.
Sybylla never saw herself as similar to other girls her age and indeed, anyone reading this novel who thought of themselves as a misfit growing up will be able to relate to her. She scorns societal ideals about proper womanly conduct and dreams about performing in theatre while insisting on taking an active role in the farm work. It isn’t all about happy endings however.
Sybylla is forced to leave Caddagat after her family’s monetary hardship grows worse in her absence and it is a horrible time for her. After being treated as an upper class member of society at the highbrow Caddagat estate she must return to live in comparative squalor. We see her spirit diminish and the Sybylla we grew to know at the beginning of the novel returns. Bitterness overcomes her, as she finds no escape from the cruelty of both the landscape and the people she is forced to share it with.
My Brilliant Career is not so much a story as a brief glimpse into the life of an Australian daughter of the country. There is no climatic ending and no sense that the novel has finished; just that it’s enough. It is perhaps because of this that the novel resonates so profoundly even days after finishing it. Perhaps too it is the recognition that the publishing of this book back in 1901 would have caused quite a stir. Sybylla holds nothing of her innermost thoughts back from the reader and it is her voice that carries you through the pages. Outspoken and discontent she is the voice of the Australian who knows she has more to give but is broken by circumstance. So many Australians can relate to this even now and that is perhaps the biggest reason as to why this novel remains such a success.
My Brilliant Career is definitely Australian – it lives, eats and breathes our history between every page. By the same measure I would definitely deem it a classic. The culture caught between each passage transcends the years between its publication and its current readers. A novel that speaks for thousands of voices and that resonates for days, I would recommend as essential reading for anyone interested in Australian Classics.
Image credit: Dan Beirouty
