Provided one has no fear of snakes - My Brilliant Career and Australia

Sybylla Melvyn, the young heroine of My Brilliant Career  is like us:

The pleasure, so exquisite as to be almost pain, which I derived from the books, and especially the Australian poets, is beyond description.  In the narrow peasant life of Possum Gully I had been deprived of companionship with people of refinement and education who would talk of the things I loved; but, at last here was congeniality, here was companionship.  (Ch. 9)

I presume a bit, but she is, right?  Books are a precious commodity in the Australian bush.  Sybylla is horrified whenever she finds herself stuck in a house without books.  And here she finds herself, after a long reading drought, in a house with books:

... my attention was arrested by what I considered the gem of the whole turn-out.  I refer to a nice little bookcase containing copies of all our Australian poets, and two or three dozen novels which I had often longed to read.  I read the first chapters of four of them, and then lost myself in Gordon, and sat on my dressing-table in my nightgown, regardless of cold, until brought to my senses by the breakfast-bell. (Ch. 9)

What does Sybylla like to read?

The regret of it all was I could never meet them – Byron, Thackeray, Dickens, Longfellow, Gordon, Kendall, the men I loved, all were dead; but, blissful thought! Caine, Paterson, and Lawson were still living, breathing human beings – two of them actually countrymen, fellow Australians! (Ch. 9)

Hall Caine has appeared at Wuthering Expectations before, having written The Deemster, one of the 100 best novels of all time; he is from the Isle of Man.  Otherwise, the names less familiar to me are Australian, members of the first great generation of Australian literature:  Banjo Paterson, who wrote “Waltzing Matilda,” Henry Lawson, Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Kendall.  Other than some random facts about Paterson – I don’t forget a name like Banjo Paterson – I know nothing about these writers.

But the Australians are the ones the narrator returns to throughout the book, giving me the pleasure of meeting an unknown literary tradition.  That is the tradition she wants to join, and presumably does join, given the evidence of the text of the novel, memoir for Sybylla, novel for Miles Franklin.  Henry Lawson actually wrote the preface to the novel, published when Franklin was twenty-one.  A proud literary nationalist, he emphasizes the Australianness of the book and the author – “the book is true to Australia”.

A digression - to me, this is the most perfectly Australian sentence in the novel: “Several doors and windows of the long room opened into the garden, and, provided one had no fear of snakes, it was delightful to walk amid the flowers and cool oneself between dances.”

Amazingly – I mean, it seems amazing given that I only know her as a sixteen year old – Miles Franklin is herself now at the center of Australian literature as a pioneering female author and the founder of the premier Australian literary prize.

If anyone would like to tell me about Franklin’s other books, I would enjoy that.  The sequel to My Brilliant Career has a fine title:  My Career Goes Bung.

I hit him again. - Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career

Do I have many readers left who, when thinking of the pinnacles of novelistic art turn to Anne of Green Gables and Jane Eyre and Little House on the Prairie for examples?  I fear I have driven these people off, what with my irony and desecrations and what have you.  If not, if they – if you – are still around, or if you know readers like this, I want to press a book into your – their – hands.  Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) belongs on that list of books.

I want to steal a line from Stefanie at So Many Books: “Pride and Prejudice meets Jane Eyre in the Australian Outback.”  Sybylla Melvyn is sixteen or so, funny, tough, ugly (or at least plain), smart, short, cussed, an outstanding heroine, although I came across JLS Hall at A Little Reading who found her “exasperating… sometimes you just want to grab her and give her a good shaking.”  That would be a bad idea:

I calmly produced my switch and brought it smartly over the shoulders of my refractory pupil in a way that sent the dust in a cloud from his dirty coat, knocked the pen from his fingers, and upset the ink.

He acted as before – yelled ear-drum-breakingly, letting the saliva from his distended mouth run on his copy-book.  His brothers and sisters also started to roar, but bringing the rod down on the table, I threatened to thrash every one of them if they so much as whimpered; and they were so dumbfounded that they sat silent in terrified surprise.  Jimmy continued to bawl.  I hit him again. (Ch. 29)

You shake her while I hide.  I would run, but Sybylla can outrun me.  The saliva is a reminder that Sybylla is at this point serving as a sort of governess for The Worst Family in Australia (“The tea and scraps, of which there was any amount, remained on the floor, to be picked up by the fowls in the morning,” Ch. 28).

Two big problems for Sybylla make up the novel.  First, how to get off of her parents’ hardscrabble, drought-stricken dairy farm:

This had been their life; this was their career.  It was, and in all probability would be, mine too. My life – my career – my brilliant career!  (“A Drought Idyll,” Ch. 5)

The novel’s title is entirely sarcastic.  The second problem is romantic, which I will leave aside except to say that Sybylla ends up making a truly difficult decision.  The novel is as feminist as they come.  If I had known nothing I would have guessed that My Brilliant Career was written by a young woman, it does feel young, so maybe the author was twenty-six, and there are passages, at least, which would have led me to guess a publication date decades after 1901.  But no, Miles Franklin was sixteen!  Several years younger than the heroine is at the end of the novel, even.  The confidence with which the book is written, the skill, or at least instinct, is perplexing.  She knew herself and kept her eyes open, and somehow knew how to knock it all into the shape of a book.