Opinion: Book profile - Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career, 107 years old, and doing fine

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The world it represents is long gone, but the writing is incredible. Miles Franklin is by any standards an advanced writer, and for a female writer in the 1890s, so far ahead of her time it’d be bizarre, if it wasn’t a fact.

She’s also a very edgy writer. She has a strong sense of story line which few people could equal. She wrote My Brilliant Career as a young woman, and had the sense to send it to Henry Lawson, the only writer ever to hold a candle to Banjo Paterson of Waltzing Matilda fame. Lawson instantly recognized the talent, and My Brilliant Career got the recognition it deserved.

It was published in 1901, the year of Federation, when Australia finally became one nation. Very apt, because in many ways it’s a quintessential book of Australia as it was.

The book is set in the Australian bush of the 1880-90s-ish era. Foreigners, particularly Americans, would recognize some of the culture, particularly the sheer brutality of rural life in that period. This is a time of horse and wagon, drought, drunkenness and squalor, with a strange veneer of gentility, like a bandage.

The heroine, Sybylla Melvyn, starts off as the daughter of a landowner, whose misadventures with business soon affect his family for the worse. Miles has an eye and a half for the hard life of the times, and few people could fail to be affected by this early part of the story.

Sybylla, loathing every second, is whisked off to her grandmother’s place, a wonderful place of comfort. Things then get very complicated, as Miles, much like her semi-heroine, plays tricks on the reader with a series of plot switches, scenarios, observations, and storylines that would have had Houdini looking for a safer job somewhere.

Her ability to turn a situation on its head is only matched by her ability to point it to some other direction a few lines later. This is excellent, sharp, writing, particularly if you know the late Victorian female literary idiom. Sybylla is a ferocious jibe at the cliché heroine, a wildcat’s response to sniveling, feeble, characters. Mockery is everywhere, and it’s backed up with a prose-based fist.

The story could turn a soft hearted reader into a sponge, wringing things out of the poor defenceless beast with every part of the narrative. Predictability isn’t part of the book.

Her hero is a decent, blameless man, who should have known better than to be in the book at all. Her other characters achieve heights and depths, but Sybylla, in the first person, is a rampant collection of ideas which would need a large, strong net to catch them. Sybylla says things which nice young ladies weren’t even supposed to think, in those days.

Miles then, after bodily hauling her readers into all these situations, provides a scene of such denigration of human life which I can only say would probably have killed a lot of readers if it wasn’t later in the book. This makes the former bestiality of life she provides at the start of the story look quite tame and placid.

Just when you think she’s done enough assault and battery, she provides a couple of plot twists which would tie a horse in knots with its own legs.

She’s a good psychologist, and knows how to end a book.

I bought this feral thing at a Salvation Army store for three dollars, in mint condition. This is the blurb and cover of my copy. with a foreword by Miles.

I can honestly say I couldn’t put it down, because I tried, repeatedly. I may or may not have damaged some furniture in the attempt, but I wound up glued to the thing.

Maddening, impossible, beautiful, fiercely honest, it’s all there for the reading.

So read it, if you dare.

Don’t say you weren’t warned.