This is not a romance—I have too often faced the music of life to the tune of hardship to waste time in snivelling and gushing over fancies and dreams; neither is it a novel, but simply a yarn—a real yarn. Oh!
Written with all the high spirits of youth, My Brilliant Career is the unforgettable tale of Sybylla Melvin, a headstrong country girl—passionate, endearing, stubborn, honest—and her fraught journey from rags to riches to rags.
Miles Franklin was born in central New South Wales, in 1879. By the age of twenty, 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 helped her to get it published in Britain in 1901. Miles Franklin published nineteen novels and provided for the creation of the Miles Franklin Award, Australia’s premier literary award.
In 1901, Miles Franklin bottled youth in her extraordinary novel, My Brilliant Career.
For the old and weary, like myself, just opening the pages can revive body and soul. For the young, My Brilliant Career can refine the senses, broaden horizons, sharpen the wit and confirm what they always suspected, that the old should be ignored.
Bright, clear, vibrant and shocking in its determination to represent women as having choices of their very own, My Brilliant Career, is a novel which needs to be recommended and read more often.