My Brilliant Career, by Stella Miles Franklin.

Happy Birthday, Stella Miles Franklin, October 14th

My Brilliant Career, by Stella Miles Franklin.

An Australian classic by and about a young woman growing up in the bush and frustrated by her lack of options.

Stella Miles Franklin was important as an Australian writer, feminist, and advocate of literary talent.  She spent years in the USA, working for labor and women’s causes with Progressive women in Chicago such as Alice Henry, also from Australia, Margaret Dreier Robins of the National Women’s Trade Union League, and Jane Adams of Hull House.  When she returned to Australia she continued to write and  support various causes.  She sought help for young Australian writers and was responsible for a major literary award in the country, which was named after her, using the male version of her name: The Miles Franklin award.

Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career when she was still in her teens.  Initially, she hoped to publish it as a male author by using only her second two names, but her ruse quickly failed.  The book is obviously autobiographical, drawing her own experiences of her family’s downward mobility and her own frustrated ambitions.  She fictionalized her story, but I was never clear how much.  The book has weaknesses as a piece of literature, perhaps resulting from the immaturity of its author.  The writing is uneven and full very adolescent mood shifts.  The plot and characters are not always believable. Through much of the book, I was troubled by how negatively she depicted herself, her parents, and many of the people with whom she lived and worked.   Yet the book is plucky and fun and worth reading.

Sybylla is the first-person narrator of Franklin’s story and the character representing Franklin. Initially, her parents had been refined and loving, but with the loss wealth her father has become a drunk and her mother a worn-out hag.  Sybylla has become an angry, frustrated teenager, seeing life as a curse and unable to believe in God or love.  When invited to live with her grandmother, she discovers a different world. Although located in the bush, her relatives had the wealth to live comfortably and appreciate literature, music and good company.  Equally as important, here Sybylla found the love she has craved from family members and from an extremely eligible neighbor.  Life becomes a pure joy for her.  But reality intervenes and Sybylla’s mother forced her to leave her grandmother’s station to live with a dull and dirty family and teach their eight children.  When her position becomes impossible, she returned to her parents’ home where she, like her mother, became a drudge.  As much as she wants to escape these conditions, she still can not see marriage as a viable alternative for her.

My Brilliant Career is an Australian classic, but as an American reader, I found myself somewhat ambivalent about it and unsure why it has been popular.  Certainly it does present a young woman’s view of a life of poverty at the edges of the bush, not the more familiar men’s version.  At times, however, Franklin seems ambivalent about her country and its residents. Her descriptions of Australian landscapes are sometimes attractive and sometimes grim.  She complains about how her country has lost its “democracy” with the emergence of hierarchical classes.  Sybylla hated the town were her family lived calling it, “stagnant  with the narrow stagnation of old country towns.”    On one hand she envies her neighbors’ lack of the restless ambition that haunts her, and on the other offers a hymn of praise for other hard-working, poverty-stricken, and proud  Australian men and women.  But personally she had nothing but disdain for the “Australian peasants” with whom she was surrounded.  Blacks are virtually invisible and, like the Chinese, degraded.  Maybe some Australian bloomers can explain the book’s appeal.

The themes that interested me most in My Brilliant Career were Sybylla’s view of herself and her mother as women.  Angry and unsympathetic to her daughter, her mother retained only hints of her previous refinement and became the symbol of everything Sybylla rejected.  Whether true or not of Franklin’s mother, in the book she turned her daughter against any hope of a loving marriage.

Sybylla’s view of herself was equally unhappy and focused on her flaws.  Franklin depicts her as stubborn and snobbish.  I don’t remember when I have read a book in which the stand-in for the author was so unappealing.  I had little empathy for her, despite my sympathy for her very real plight.  But Sybylla was aware of how poorly she fit into her society, sometimes blaming herself and sometimes blaming society.  She saw herself as impossibly ugly and unfit for love.  Worst of all, she viewed herself as an unthinkable creature, a woman with a brain.  Recognizing her own ambition and restlessness, she was certain that she was inadequate as a woman and would be a disaster as a wife.  When an admirably strong, rich, attractive, gentle man fell in love with her, she was tempted, but turned him down. She urged him to find a more suitable woman for his own good.  No matter what her suitor said, she could not believe that a man could love a woman who sought to be an author.  As a reader, I felt her refusal was a tragedy.  That is not my typical response to romance, but like the author I could not see any other viable option for her.

Having rejected the only possible escape for a woman in rural Australia, Sybylla saw no future for herself.  Like Christie in Louisa May Alcott’s Work, she had found that there simply were no real options for a young woman to be independent.  She cannot support herself; much less engage in the “cultural” offerings of society, like books and music.  Franklin shows us that structural societal change is necessary if women are to live full lives.  Personal desire and hard work will never be enough.  Yet Sybylla and Franklin continue to write.

Reading Franklin’s autobiographical book provoked me to find the recent biography of Stella Miles Franklin by Jill Roe, which has been positively reviewed online by ANZLITLOV and Stumbling through the Past.  I wonder if I would like her better as a person rather than as she presented herself as Sybylla.

I recommend My Brilliant Career to other readers, especially those curious about Australian life and literature and those interested in women’s experiences globally.