'In this sequel to Miles Franklin's famous novel My Brilliant Career, once again we encounter the enchanting Sybylla Melvyn. She's a little older now, catapulted from bush obscurity into sudden fame with the publication of her autobiography. Sybylla goes to fashionable Sydney to further her career in the literary world, but her patrons, her critics and her innumerable suitors meet more than they bargained for in the wilful Sybylla.'
Source: Publisher's blurb (House of Books ed.).
My Brilliant Career
Edinburgh
London
:
William Blackwood
,
1901
Z161522
1901
single work
novel
(taught in 56 units)
'My Brilliant Career was written by Stella Franklin (1879-1954) when she was just nineteen years old. The novel struggled to find an Australian publisher, but was published in London and Edinburgh in 1901 after receiving an endorsement from Henry Lawson. Although Franklin wrote under the pseudonym 'Miles Franklin', Lawson’s preface makes it clear that Franklin is, as Lawson puts it 'a girl.'
'The novel relates the story of Sybylla Melvyn, a strong-willed young woman of the 1890s growing up in the Goulburn area of New South Wales and longing to be a writer.' (Publication summary)
'Miles Franklin, as many scholars have suggested, was an inherently contradictory personality. Friends and colleagues have represented her as someone who rarely disclosed her private life. Marjory Barnard highlighted Franklin's privacy when she wrote in her biography of Franklin: 'Who knows exactly what Miles felt - even when she told you?' (1967, 49). In her collection of Australian women writers' diaries and letters from this era, Carole Ferrier writes: 'Franklin does not generally reveal a great deal about her personal life in her letters' (1992, 6). Jill Roe describes her as 'self-protective to a degree people still find incomprehensible' (2008, 345). This article has been developed from a larger project that set out to explore 'the dynamics of her interior life' (Roe 2004, 44) as expressed in Franklin'd manuscript diaries, held at the Mitchell Library in Sydney.' (p63)
