by Miles Franklin
Sybylla Melvyn (plain, clever, stage-struck) grows up in genteel poverty on a drought-stricken selection in the New South Wales bush. Sent to live with her wealthy grandmother at Caddagat, she is courted by the well-off young grazier Harold Beecham. Torn between the security and love he offers and her hunger for an independent creative life, she refuses him, twice, and returns to hardship, choosing an uncertain future over marriage.
Franklin wrote the novel before she was twenty, and it caused a sensation: a raw first-person Australian girl's voice, funny and furious, rejecting the marriage plot that almost every nineteenth-century novel about a young woman was built to deliver. Stung by readers who took it as literal autobiography, Franklin suppressed the book for decades; it returned to fame with Gillian Armstrong's 1979 film.
Sybylla wants “a brilliant career” in writing, music, art. The novel dramatises how nearly impossible that is for a poor bush girl — and refuses to pretend otherwise with a tidy success.
Where to look: the opening declaration; her reading and piano at Caddagat; the deliberately anti-climactic ending.
Harold offers love, wealth and real kindness, and Sybylla still says no — because marriage as she sees it means the end of a self. The book treats this as a genuine, costly choice, not a whim.
Where to look: both of Harold's proposals; “marriage... the most horribly tied-down and unfair-to-women existence”; the riding-crop scene.
Drought, debt, dust and unending domestic work at Possum Gully and Barney's Gap puncture the myth of the noble bush — though Caddagat also shows the country at its most beautiful.
Where to look: the move to Possum Gully; the M'Swat household; the drought passages.
Sybylla is told over and over that she is ugly and difficult. Womanhood is presented as a set of cages (looks, docility, service), and she rages against every bar of it.
Where to look: her mother's criticism; “it was only men who could take the world by its ears”; the governess post at the M'Swats'.
The distance between Caddagat gentility and Possum Gully poverty. Sybylla is effectively sold into service at the M'Swats' to pay off her father's debt; education marks the class line.
Where to look: Caddagat versus Possum Gully; the debt to Peter M'Swat; Grandma Bossier's world.
Sybylla's romantic imagination keeps colliding with reality. The book both indulges the romance form and mocks it, starting from its first line.
Where to look: the framing introduction; “this is not a romance”; the refusal of a wedding ending.
“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.”
Sybylla — Introduction
Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (1879–1954) grew up on the Monaro and near Goulburn, in the world the novel describes. She wrote My Brilliant Career as a teenager; Henry Lawson helped place it with a Scottish publisher and wrote its preface. She later endowed the Miles Franklin Award, still Australia's major literary prize.
Published in 1901, the year of Federation, at a moment of loud national self-definition — bush ballads, the “coming man”, the legend of the pioneer. Franklin writes from inside that world but as a girl, and finds the legend does not have room for her.
White women in some Australian colonies had just won the vote (South Australia 1894; federally 1902), but a rural woman's options were still marriage or unpaid family labour or, at best, governessing. Higher education and the professions were barely open.
The Melvyns are “selectors” (small farmers on land carved from the big pastoral runs) and, like many, they fail: drought, debt and poor land grind them down. The 1890s were a decade of depression and severe drought across eastern Australia.
Franklin was so distressed by being identified with Sybylla that she withdrew the book and forbade republication in her lifetime. It came back into print in 1965 and reached a mass audience through the acclaimed 1979 film.
Sixteen when the story opens; bookish, theatrical, self-dramatising, convinced she is plain. Wants a creative life and will not trade it for a husband, however much it costs her.
Wealthy, steady, genuinely kind; loves Sybylla and proposes twice. Represents everything secure and everything Sybylla fears will absorb her.
Her father, once a respectable squatter, sinks into drink and debt after moving to Possum Gully; her mother, worn and sharp, blames Sybylla for her discontent.
Sybylla's grandmother and widowed aunt give her a taste of comfort, books and music. Aunt Helen is the one adult who treats her with real tenderness.
Uneducated, hard-working selectors to whom Sybylla is sent as governess to work off her father's debt. Her disgust at their household is also snobbery she half-recognises.
The tiresome jackaroo and the polished city man who dangles a stage career — both showing the narrow menu of futures on offer.
Sybylla warns the reader off any expectation of a love story, and stakes her claim to tell her own unglamorous truth.
The move from the loved station to Possum Gully; her father's decline; the drought; and Sybylla's despair that this drudgery is all her “brilliant career” will ever be.
Comfort, books, music, affection. Sybylla blooms — and gets a glimpse of the life her talents might deserve.
He offers marriage and Five-Bob Downs. Sybylla, drawn to him but afraid of disappearing into wifehood, puts him off.
Provoked, Sybylla strikes Harold across the face with her whip. He does not retaliate; the scene tests what kind of man he is — and what kind of power she wants.
Sent to the M'Swats' to pay the family debt, Sybylla is miserable, ill and ashamed — of the household and of her own contempt for it.
Harold returns and proposes again; Sybylla cannot say yes. The novel ends not with a wedding but with her alone, addressing her “sunburnt” country and an unwritten future.
“Marriage to me appeared the most horribly tied-down and unfair-to-women existence going.”
Sybylla — Chapter 7
Miles Franklin wrote this at nineteen and the voice is deliberately uneven — grand one moment, self-mocking the next. Note the register of each line you take.
“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.”Sybylla — Introduction
“Better be born a slave than a poet, better be born black than a woman, better be born a pauper than an artist — and yet, on the other hand...”Sybylla — opening chapter
“I longed for the arts. Music was a passion with me.”Sybylla — Ch. 5 (the drought)
“This was life — my life — my career, my brilliant career! I was fifteen — fifteen! A few fleeting hours and I would be old like those around me.”Sybylla, in the drought at Possum Gully — Ch. 5
“I made a fool of myself... I wanted to be a writer.”Sybylla (close paraphrase) — Caddagat chapters
“I read anything and everything I could lay my hands on.”Sybylla, of her childhood reading — Ch. 2 –3
“My sphere in life is only a peasant's.”Sybylla, refusing to romanticise her prospects — later chapters
“I have a curious feeling that... I will surely someday do something.”Sybylla (close paraphrase) — Caddagat
“Marriage to me appeared the most horribly tied-down and unfair-to-women existence going. It would be from fair to middling if there was love; but I laughed at the idea of love.”Sybylla — the Caddagat chapters
“Nothing on earth would induce me to marry, even if the person I chose combined the qualities of all the male beings in the world.”Sybylla (close paraphrase) — Caddagat chapters
“I don't love you, and I never will.”Sybylla to Harold Beecham (close paraphrase) — the proposal
“With all my strength I brought my riding-whip down across his face.”Sybylla, when Harold seizes her — the whip scene
“I cannot marry you... I am not fit to be your wife... I am too small, too ugly.”Sybylla to Harold (close paraphrase) — the final refusal
“Because I am poor I do not see why I should marry a rich man.”Sybylla (close paraphrase) — later chapters
“I could never be his wife... I loved him too well to become a millstone about his neck.”Sybylla (close paraphrase) — closing chapters
“It came home to me as a great blow that it was only men who could take the world by its ears and conquer their fate, while women, metaphorically speaking, were forced to sit with tied hands and patiently suffer as the waves of fate tossed them hither and thither.”Sybylla — Ch. 7
“I am a girl... and cursed with the ability to feel and think.”Sybylla (close paraphrase) — Possum Gully chapters
“The curse of Eve being upon me, I had to obey.”Sybylla (close paraphrase) — on being sent to Barney's Gap
“A candle... will burn itself out... I was a girl — that was the trouble.”Sybylla (close paraphrase) — the drought
“I am given to something which a good many people would call selfishness. It is a want of interest in other people's affairs.”Sybylla — Introduction / Ch. 1 (close paraphrase)
“I possess the greatest curse that can be laid on anyone in this world: I am ugly.”Sybylla (close paraphrase) — Caddagat
“Loneliness was a malady with which I was ever afflicted.”Sybylla (close paraphrase) — Possum Gully chapters
“Why do I write? For what does anyone write?”Sybylla — Introduction (close paraphrase)
“I would be a slave, a very servant of servants... and yet my heart was full of a great love for beauty and light.”Sybylla (close paraphrase) — Barney's Gap
“Possum Gully... a big lump of a dairy farm” where the family's fortunes collapse after her father takes to drink.Sybylla, of the move from Bruggabrong — Ch. 2 –3
“Barney's Gap” and the M'Swats — “dirty”, “ignorant”, “the flies”: the household she is sent to as a governess to pay off her father's debt.Sybylla — the Barney's Gap chapters
“They had no books, no papers, no piano... nothing.”Sybylla, of the M'Swats (close paraphrase) — Barney's Gap
“Caddagat” — her grandmother's comfortable station, and the one place Sybylla is happy: books, music, and Aunt Helen.Sybylla — the Caddagat chapters
“It was money, curse it, that was at the bottom of everything.”Sybylla (close paraphrase) — later chapters
“I am proud that I am an Australian, a daughter of the Southern Cross, a child of the mighty bush.”Sybylla — final chapter
“Ah, my sunburnt brothers! — sons of toil and of Australia! I love and respect you well.”Sybylla, closing apostrophe to the bushmen — final chapter
“The great sun is sinking in the west... my sunburnt sunset land.”Sybylla (close paraphrase) — final chapter
“Good night! Good-bye! Amen.”Sybylla — final line
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