My Brilliant Career

Book 150: Virago Modern Classics

by Miles Franklin, Carmen Callil

Genres: Romance

Synopsis

'I am given to something which a man never pardons in a woman. You will draw away as though I were a snake when you hear.' With this warning, Sybylla confesses to her rich and handsome suitor that she is given to writing stories and bound, therefore, on a brilliant career. In this ironically titled and exuberant novel by Miles Franklin, originally published in 1901, Sybylla tells the story of growing up passionate and rebellious in rural New South Wales, where the most that girls could hope for was to marry or to teach. Sybylla will do neither, but that doesn't stop her from falling in love, and it doesn't make the choices any easier.

Release date: October 2, 2007

Publisher: Penguin Classics

Print pages: 288

Sample

Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin was born on October 14 1879. Of Irish descent on her father’s side, of German and English
descent on her mother’s, she was a fifth generation Australian, her maternal great-great grandfather Edward Miles arriving
at Sydney Cove in 1788 with the First Fleet. Her family were pioneers, mountain squatters settled in the rough and beautiful
mountain-guarded valleys of the Australian Alps in New South Wales, on the Western edge of what is now the Australian Capital
Territory. Miles Franklin spent her first ten years on her father’s cattle station, ‘Brindabella’, growing up with her six
younger brothers and sisters, sharing with them and neighbouring cousins a Scottish tutor – a remittance man often the worse
for drink – who nevertheless gave her a grounding in composition and a love of literature advanced for her years. ‘Shakespeare,
the Bible, Dickens, Aesop’s fables – that’s what I was brung (or drugged up) on.’ When Stella Franklin was ten her family
moved down from the mountains, first to a dairying selection*, then to a small property, ‘Stillwater’ (‘Possum Gully’ in My Brilliant Career). Stella Franklin was deeply affected by this change, and the harsh conditions of a pioneering selector’s life, and these
years were a period of growing rebellion. She did not get on with her austere mother, and was jealous of her younger and prettier
sister who was allowed to spend some years with their maternal grandmother on the beautiful family property, ‘Talbingo’ (‘Caddagat’
in My Brilliant Career). Stella Franklin was a born horsewoman, famous as a local showrider in the district; she loved music and wanted to be a singer.
Reduced family circumstances making this impossible, she turned her attention to writing. When she was only sixteen she wrote
My Brilliant Career – ‘conceived and tossed off in a matter of weeks’.


Family life in the Australian bush was not the only influence on Stella Franklin’s writing. She was acutely affected too by
the decade in which she grew up – the 1890s, a period of political and artistic ferment in Australia. Politically the movement
to federate the six Australian states was at its peak in those years, leading to the establishment of Australia as an independent
Commonwealth on January 1 1901, the year in which My Brilliant Career was first published. Artistically the nineties saw the emergence of aggressive nationalism in literature too. The writers
of this decade, encouraged by the famous Australian weekly The Bulletin, struggled to give depth and definition to a new and different race of people living in a new and different country. These
writers were exuberant, masculine, openly chauvinistic both politically and sexually, resentful of the old world with its
hereditary privileges, its landlordism, its class distinctions. ‘We have nothing in common with the English people except
our language,’ wrote Henry Lawson, the most typical of this group (he provided a preface to the first edition of My Brilliant Career). These writers, Lawson, ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Will Ogilvie and many others gave a literary soul to Australia, presenting its population – predominantly urban then as now –
with an image of the Bush as the ‘real Australia’, celebrating as the only ‘real Australian’ the country bushman, with his
code of ‘mateship’, his independence, his belief in the fellowship of the working man. ‘Man’ is the operative word in this
ethos, and indeed it had little place for or interest in its womenfolk, except as the suffering and passive recipients of
the lives allotted them by the brave men with whom they lived, and the tough circumstances of Australian bush life.


Miles Franklin absorbed and shared the intense nationalism and socialism of her male contemporary mentors, as is made abundantly
and sometimes gratingly clear in the pages of My Brilliant Career. But she revolted then and forever against the role of women in their scheme of things, against the ‘dullness and tame hennishness’
of women’s lives. It is interesting that My Brilliant Career, published two years before the novel which best expresses the sentiments of nineties Australian nationalism, Joseph Furphy’s
Such Is Life, remained out of print from 1901 until 1966. This was Miles Franklin’s own wish, but it is obvious too that as a woman, expressing
a woman’s view of those halcyon days, she had no place in any establishment view of the ‘great’ Australian literature of the
nineties.


There were other reasons why Stella Franklin refused to keep the book in print. Like most of her female contemporaries, she
chose to publish under a male pseudonym (Henry Handel Richardson did the same and it is no coincidence that Laura, the heroine
of The Getting Of Wisdom, is in many ways a literary twin of Sybylla). Initially she submitted her manuscript to The Bulletin; through them Henry Lawson read it and advised her to send it to his publishers, Blackwoods in Edinburgh. Using her great-great
grandfather’s name, Miles, did not help when My Brilliant Career was finally published in 1901. Publication brought Miles Franklin instant fame and unwelcome notoriety, most particularly
in the district in which she had to live, where it was received as fact, not fiction. Miles Franklin insisted that it was
merely a ‘girl’s story’, and that she withdrew it from publication because of the ‘stupid literalness’ with which it was taken
to be her own autobiography. However, there is a supposition that she was influenced too by the critical comments of Havelock
Ellis who lived in Australia from 1875–9, and who reviewed the book for the Weekly Critical Review (Paris 1903). He described it as a ‘vivid and sincere book, certainly the true reflection of the life around her. Such a
book has psychological interest, the interest that belongs to the confessions of a Marie Bashkirtseff of the bush.’ He was
critical of its crudity though, of its ‘embittered and egotistical mood’, which he interpreted as unconscious abnormality.


It is difficult now to assess which of these depressing reactions was responsible for the disappearance of My Brilliant Career for over sixty years. Certainly in the sequel to My Brilliant Career, My Career Goes Bung, Miles Franklin refers with contempt to ‘the dubious guesses of psychoanalysis’. Whatever her reactions to psychological
analysis and family disapproval, now one cannot but think that Miles Franklin was decades ahead of her time and that My Brilliant Career was written for an audience not yet born.


For in the character of Sybylla Melvyn, Miles Franklin created a character who mouths with incredible charm but deadly accuracy
the fears, conflicts and torments of every girl, with an understanding usually associated with writers of the 1960s and ’70s.
Sybylla is a girl in a man’s world, a girl who ‘being so very plain’ knows she is ‘not a valuable article in the marriage
market’, but despises the slavery which respectable marriage will bring. She will never ‘perpetrate matrimony’, will not be
a ‘participant’ in that ‘degradation’ – this is astounding stuff from a sixteen-year-old living in the outback in 1885. She has ideas about politics, about writing and music, and she sees quite
clearly the life of loneliness this will mean for her because she is a woman – ‘a man with these notions is a curse to himself
but a woman … she is not merely a creature out of her sphere – she is a creature without a sphere – a lonely being!’ And yet
Sybylla knows the value of love between man and woman – ‘our greatest heart-treasure is a knowledge that there is in creation
an individual to whom our existence is necessary – someone who is part of our life as we are part of theirs, someone in whose
life we feel assured our death would leave a gap for a day or two. And who can be this but a husband or wife?’


Sybylla is the product of unsophisticated genius, a creation of tremendous energy, whose ebullient outpourings place this
novel well above and outside the nostalgic portrayals of Miles Franklin’s literary contemporaries. Not only does she fictionalize
the conflicts of adolescence and of every woman’s life, more, in Sybylla Miles Franklin has created a literary personality
which truly lives. For Sybylla is no mere ‘whinger’. She laughs and flirts and battles and endlessly sends herself up; she
cuts herself down to size in the most endearing way, so that despite its juvenile prose, the adolescent fantasies which constitute
the plot, its rampant and irritating Australian nationalism, the emotion one feels when reading My Brilliant Career is one of passionate identification with Sybylla and her rags to riches story. At the moment when Sybylla tells her suitor
Harry of her final decision, one can hear a million female voices saying, ‘Oh no,’ but then adding, ‘Yes, you’re right, and
good luck to you.’ My Brilliant Career presents one of the most encouraging heroines in fiction, because Sybylla knows what her problems are. One can hardly restrain oneself from leaping back in time to tell Miles Franklin: ‘Sybylla is me.’


In 1901 however, Miles Franklin was so distressed by the reaction to her novel that she left home, moving in 1904 to Sydney.
There she worked as a domestic servant for a year, writing for The Bulletin under the pseudonym of Mary Anne (the second of her literary masks) and preparing the novel she’d begun in the intervening
years: My Career Goes Bung. At this time she met the Australian suffragist Rose Scott whose salon, a centre for feminist and intellectual discussion,
Miles Franklin often visited. My Career Goes Bung, intended as a corrective to My Brilliant Career, was rejected by publishers as too outspoken (it was finally published, unaltered, in 1946). Disillusioned, Miles Franklin
decided to go to America, an exile from her native land which was to last for nearly thirty years. She never returned to the
bush country of her childhood, but her memories of it are the cornerstone of all her later writing.


In America Miles Franklin joined the Australian feminist and labour leader Alice Henry. For the next ten years she worked
with her for the Women’s Trade Union League, managing its national office in Chicago and editing its magazine Life and Labour. During those years she wrote only one book, Some Everyday Folk And Dawn (1909), dedicated to ‘English men who believe in votes for women’, its heroine Dawn a more mature Sybylla. In a later novel Cockatoos (written 1927/8, published 1945), Miles Franklin fictionalised the artistic frustration and homesickness she felt in those
years.


With the outbreak of the First World War she went to London, at first working in slum nurseries and then joining the Scottish
Women’s Hospital Unit which was stationed at Salonika in the Balkans. This extraordinary hospital unit was the brainchild
of Elsie Inglis, the Scottish surgeon, Suffragist and hospital administrator. By August 1914 this redoubtable woman had collected
expert women physicians, surgeons, nurses and drivers to go to the Front. She had also collected £25,000, but the War Office replied with ‘My good lady, go home and
sit still.’ The French immediately accepted her offer, and later Dr Inglis took her unit to Serbia. Here Miles Franklin joined
them, serving from 1917–18.


After the war she returned to London where she worked as a political secretary for the National Housing Council in Bloomsbury,
making two brief trips to Australia in 1924 and 1930. About this fascinating period of her life little is known. She published
only three novels in these years, two of them part of a sequence of six novels which were published between 1928 and 1956
under yet another pseudonym, ‘Brent of Bin Bin’. The Bin Bin novels, published out of order but interconnected, form a saga
of Australian pioneering life, telling the story of a group of pastoral families from the 1850s to the 1930s. Written in London
between 1925–1931, Miles Franklin released into them a flood of childhood memories, writing about the people she’d known and
the bush she’d loved as a child. In her lifetime Miles Franklin refused to admit that she was Brent of Bin Bin, that old reaction
to My Brilliant Career standing permanently as a barrier between her creative capacity and the works she wished to write. Return to Australia in
1933 seems to have exorcised that ghost for in 1936 she published, under her own name, another heroic account of pioneer life,
All That Swagger (1936). This novel and the Bin Bin sequence have been critically considered her greatest literary works.


On her return to Australia Miles Franklin settled in Carlton, a suburb of Sydney, in the house she inherited from her mother
and where she was to spend the rest of her life. Her Bin Bin novels were gradually published, as was My Career Goes Bung; but it seems that exile from the country she so passionately loved was the moving force in her work. She wrote seventeen
books in all, twelve of them novels, but except for her reminiscences, Childhood at Brindabella, which she wrote in the last few years of her life, by 1936 her best work was done.


In the following years she collaborated on two books, lectured, endlessly nurtured and encouraged young Australian writers
and continued always her crusades – for more rights for women, for the underprivileged, for more opportunities for her fellow
writers, against war everywhere. She never married: ‘marriage appeared the most horribly tied-down and unfair-to-women existence
going – I laughed at the idea of love …’ (Sybylla), but had numerous and devoted friends. She died in 1954 at the age of 75.
Reading a tribute to her written by many of her friends (The Bread and Cheese Club, Melbourne, 1955), she seems to be the
very embodiment of Sybylla, impetuous, warm-hearted, quick-tongued, a woman who loved life in all its manifestations and who
had no more insulation against it than the heroine of her first and greatest work.


There is a great deal more to be discovered and written about the life and times of Miles Franklin. Her personality remains
an enigma, a passionate interest in people and affairs serving, as did her pseudonyms, to hide her private self from public
gaze. Until that work is done she will be known through the books she wrote, most particularly through the young girl who
tells her story in My Brilliant Career, Sybylla/Stella, who could be any girl in any country, any place, at any time.


Carmen CallilLondon, 1980

Possum Gully, near Goulburn,N.S. Wales, Australia, 1st March, 1899

My Dear Fellow Australians

Just a few lines to tell you that this story is all about myself – for no other purpose do I write it.

I make no apologies for being egotistical. In this particular I attempt an improvement on other autobiographies. Other autobiographies
weary one with excuses for their egotism. What matters it to you if I am egotistical? What matters it to you though it should
matter that I am egotistical?


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! as real, as really real – provided life itself is anything beyond a heartless little chimera – it is as real in
its weariness and bitter heartache as the tall gum-trees, among which I first saw the light, are real in their stateliness
and substantiality.


My sphere in life is not congenial to me. Oh, how I hate this living death which has swallowed all my teens, which is greedily
devouring my youth, which will sap my prime, and in which my old age, if I am cursed with any, will be worn away! As my life
creeps on for ever through the long toil-laden days with its agonizing monotony, narrowness, and absolute uncongeniality,
how my spirit frets and champs its unbreakable fetters – all in vain!


SPECIAL NOTICE

You can dive into this story head first as it were. Do not fear encountering such trash as descriptions of beautiful sunsets
and whisperings of wind. We (999 out of every 1000) can see nought in sunsets save as signs and tokens whether we may expect
rain on the morrow or the contrary, so we will leave such vain and foolish imagining to those poets and painters – poor fools!
Let us rejoice that we are not of their temperament!


Better be born a slave than a poet, better be born a black, better be born a cripple! For a poet must be companionless – alone!
fearfully alone in the midst of his fellows whom he loves. Alone because his soul is as far above common mortals as common mortals
are above monkeys.


There is no plot in this story, because there has been none in my life or in any other life which has come under my notice.
I am one of a class, the individuals of which have not time for plots in their life, but have all they can do to get their
work done without indulging in such a luxury.


‘Boo, hoo! Ow, ow; Oh! oh! Me’ll die. Boo, hoo. The pain, the pain! Boo, hoo!’

‘Come, come, now. Daddy’s little mate isn’t going to turn Turk like that, is she? I’ll put some fat out of the dinner-bag
on it, and tie it up in my hanky. Don’t cry any more now. Hush, you must not cry! You’ll make old Dart buck if you kick up
a row like that.’


That is my first recollection of life. I was barely three. I can remember the majestic gum-trees surrounding us, the sun glinting
on their straight white trunks, and falling on the gurgling fern-banked stream, which disappeared beneath a steep scrubby
hill on our left. It was an hour past noon on a long clear summer day. We were on a distant part of the run, where my father
had come to deposit salt. He had left home early in the dewy morning, carrying me in front of him on a little brown pillow
which my mother had made for the purpose. We had put the lumps of rock-salt in the troughs on the other side of the creek.
The stringybark roof of the salt-shed which protected the troughs from rain peeped out picturesquely from the musk and peppercorn
shrubs by which it was densely surrounded, and was visible from where we lunched. I refilled the quart-pot in which we had boiled our tea with water from the creek, father doused our fire out
with it, and then tied the quart to the D of his saddle with a piece of green hide. The green-hide bags in which the salt
had been carried were hanging on the hooks of the pack-saddle which encumbered the bay pack-horse. Father’s saddle and the
brown pillow were on Dart, the big grey horse on which he generally carried me, and we were on the point of making tracks
for home.


Preparatory to starting, father was muzzling the dogs which had just finished what lunch we had left. This process, to which
the dogs strongly objected, was rendered necessary by a cogent reason. Father had brought his strychnine flask with him that
day, and in hopes of causing the death of a few dingoes, had put strong doses of its contents in several dead beasts which
we had come across.


Whilst the dogs were being muzzled, I busied myself in plucking ferns and flowers. This disturbed a big black snake which
was curled at the butt of a tree fern.


‘Bitey! bitey!’ I yelled, and father came to my rescue, despatching the reptile with his stock-whip. He had been smoking,
and dropped his pipe on the ferns. I picked it up, and the glowing embers which fell from it burnt my dirty little fat fists.
Hence the noise with which my story commences.


In all probability it was the burning of my fingers which so indelibly impressed the incident on my infantile mind. My father
was accustomed to take me with him, but that is the only jaunt at that date which I remember, and that is all I remember of
it. We were twelve miles from home, but how we reached there I do not know.


My father was a swell in those days – held Bruggabrong, Bin Bin East, and Bin Bin West, which three stations totalled close
on 200,000 acres. Father was admitted into swelldom merely by right of his position. His pedigree included nothing beyond a grandfather. My mother, however, was a full-fledged aristocrat.
She was one of the Bossiers of Caddagat, who numbered among their ancestry one of the depraved old pirates who pillaged England
with William the Conqueror.


‘Dick’ Melvyn was as renowned for hospitality as joviality, and our comfortable, wide-veranda’ed, irregularly built, slab
house in its sheltered nook amid the Timlinbilly Ranges was ever full to overflowing. Doctors, lawyers, squatters, commercial
travellers, bankers, journalists, tourists, and men of all kinds and classes crowded our well-spread board; but seldom a female
face, except mother’s, was to be seen there, Bruggabrong being a very out-of-the-way place.


I was both the terror and the amusement of the station. Old boundary-riders and drovers inquire after me with interest to
this day.


I knew everyone’s business, and was ever in danger of publishing it at an inopportune moment.

In flowery language, selected from slang used by the station hands, and long words picked up from our visitors, I propounded
unanswerable questions which brought blushes to the cheeks of even tough old wine-bibbers.


Nothing would induce me to show more respect to an appraiser of the runs than to a boundary-rider, or to a clergyman than
a drover. I am the same to this day. My organ of veneration must be flatter than a pancake, because to venerate a person simply
for his position I never did or will. To me the Prince of Wales will be no more than a shearer, unless when I meet him he
displays some personality apart from his princeship – otherwise he can go hang.


Authentic record of the date when first I had a horse to myself has not been kept, but it must have been early, as at eight
I was fit to ride anything on the place. Side-saddle, man-saddle, no-saddle, or astride were all the same to me. I rode among the
musterers as gamely as any of the big sunburnt bushmen.


My mother remonstrated, opined I would be a great unwomanly tomboy. My father poohed the idea.

‘Let her alone, Lucy,’ he said, ‘let her alone. The rubbishing conventionalities which are the curse of her sex will bother
her soon enough. Let her alone!’


So, smiling and saying, ‘She should have been a boy,’ my mother let me alone, and I rode, and in comparison to my size made
as much noise with my stock-whip as any one. Accidents had no power over me, I came unscathed out of droves of them.


Fear I knew not. Did a drunken tramp happen to kick up a row, I was always the first to confront him, and, from my majestic
and roly-poly height of two feet six inches, demand what he wanted.


A digging started near us and was worked by a score of two dark-browed sons of Italy. They made mother nervous, and she averred
they were not to be trusted, but I liked and trusted them. They carried me on their broad shoulders, stuffed me with lollies
and made a general pet of me. Without the quiver of a nerve I swung down their deepest shafts in the big bucket on the end
of a rope attached to a rough windlass, which brought up the miners and the mullock.


My brothers and sisters contracted mumps, measles, scarlatina, and whooping-cough. I rolled in the bed with them yet came
off scot-free. I romped with dogs, climbed trees after birds’ nests, drove the bullocks in the dray, under the instructions
of Ben, our bullocky, and always accompanied my father when he went swimming in the clear, mountain, shrub-lined stream which
ran deep and lone among the weird gullies, thickly carpeted with maidenhair and numberless other species of ferns.


My mother shook her head over me and trembled for my future, but father seemed to consider me nothing unusual. He was my hero,
confidant, encyclopedia, mate, and even my religion till I was ten. Since then I have been religionless.


Richard Melvyn, you were a fine fellow in those days! A kind and indulgent parent, a chivalrous husband, a capital host, a
man full of ambition and gentlemanliness.


Amid these scenes, and the refinements and pleasures of Caddagat, which lies a hundred miles or so farther Riverinawards,
I spent the first years of my childhood.


I was nearly nine summers old when my father conceived the idea that he was wasting his talents by keeping them rolled up
in the small napkin of an out-of-the-way place like Bruggabrong and the Bin Bin stations. Therefore he determined to take
up his residence in a locality where he would have more scope for his ability.


When giving his reason for moving to my mother, he put the matter before her thus: The price of cattle and horses had fallen
so of late years that it was impossible to make much of a living by breeding them. Sheep were the onl. . .