My Brilliant Career

Miles Franklin

2012년 1월 · Allen & Unwin

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'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!'

First published in 1901, this Australian classic is the candid tale of the aspirations and frustrations of sixteen-year-old Sybylla Melvin, a headstrong country girl constrained by middle-class social arrangements, especially the pressure to marry.

Trapped on her parents' outback farm, Sybylla simultaneously loves bush life and hates the physical burdens it imposes. She longs for a more refined lifestyle - to read, to think, to sing - but most of all to do great things. Suddenly her life is transformed when she is whisked away to live on her grandmother's gracious property. There Sybylla falls under the eye of the rich and handsome Harry Beecham. Soon she finds herself choosing between everything a conventional life offers and her own plans for a 'brilliant career'.

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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.