My Brilliant Career

Miles Franklin’s fierce and funny My Brilliant Career is the passionate semi-autobiographical novel of a young woman living in the Australian bush who wants more than the life she’s been given.

Sybylla Penelope Melvyn had no intention of accepting the hand she’d been dealt. Living deep in the Australian bush, her family is plunged further into poverty when drought and her father’s bad decisions carry them from their station at Bruggabrong to a struggling dairy farm at Possum Gully, in New South Wales. Convinced she is destined for more than a poor life with no prospects, and with dreams of becoming an independent writer, she eventually receives an invitation to her grandmother’s homestead at Caddagat. Told in Sybylla’s own headstrong voice, by turns scathing, comic, and heartfelt, this well-loved coming-of-age classic follows her from her humble beginnings as she tries to make a life of her own. But will this new future be everything she hoped for?

Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career while still in her teens, and it was published in 1901 with a preface by Henry Lawson. She later withdrew it from print in 1910, yet it has become one of the treasured books of Australian literature, and her bequest founded the Miles Franklin Literary Award.

A brilliant example of early women’s writing and Australian fiction, My Brilliant Career is an essential novel for every reader who has longed for a life of their own making. Perfect or readers who love the headstrong heroines of Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and Jane Eyre.