My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin was first published in 1901, it’s an Australian classic and I’ve been meaning to get around to reading it for years. I kept seeing copies of it in secondhand bookshops but something else always seemed to be shouting louder at me to buy it so I’ve been passing it by for years, that turned out to be really silly as it is a great read. It was a total surprise to me to discover that Miles Franklin was actually a woman Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, she was born in 1879. She wrote this very autobiographical novel when she was just 16, which seems amazing to me.
Sybylla is not quite nine years old when her father decides to move his large family away from the sheep station where she had been living since she was born. Her father thinks that he has a better chance of making a living on a one thousand acre farm in the flat countryside of Goulburn. But he isn’t any more successful there and his drinking gets worse and worse. The mother is worn out, she had come from a fairly well off genteel family and life hasn’t gone the way she expected it to. She takes her frustrations out on her eldest daughter Sybylla who gets the blame for everything while her younger sister (all of 11 months younger!) is her mother’s darling pet. Sybylla is exhausted with all the farm and house work that she has to do, not that she gets any thanks for it.
As you would expect she dreams of a better life, but things go from bad to worse and even their clothes are in rags, there has been no rain for years and there are animals dying for want of water and grass. Sybylla isn’t going to marry a poor man like her father, she wants to write, and when her mother sends her to live with her grandmother in what had been her mother’s family home Sybylla can hardly believe her luck. They even have books! She has never seen such comfort and she quickly becomes a favourite of her grandmother, aunt and others. She even has a rich young man who is interested in her, but she’s torn away from everything she loves as her feckless father has borrowed money, and Sybylla is expected to work in the home of his creditor in lieu of the debt’s interest. She’s just a slave to a large and dirty family.
Throughout this book the author’s love for the Australian land is obvious although I suspect that unless you have grown up with that sort of landscape it’s difficult to imagine and appreciate the beauty of it.
This book has an unexpected ending, but then Miles Franklin had an unusual life and she stuck to her independent spirit throughout it all. She was a feminist, during WW1 she worked for the Scottish Women’s Hospitals in the Serbian campaign and endowed the Miles Franklin Prize for Australian literature and the Stella Prize was named after her too.
