My Brilliant Career (Masterplots II: British and Commonwealth Fiction Series)
At a glance:
- Author: Miles Franklin
- First Published: 1901
- Type of Work: Fictional autobiography
- Time of Work: The 1890’s
- Setting: Caddagat, an isolated community “up the country” (far from Sydney, Australia) and the Goulburn district, about one hundred miles southwest of Sydney
- Principal Characters: Sybylla Penelope Melvyn, Richard (Dick) Melvyn, Grandmother Bossier, Aunt Helen, Harold Augustus (Harry) Beecham, Everard Grey, Frank Hawden, Peter McSwat
- Genres: Long fiction, Social realism, Bildungsroman, Autobiographical fiction
- Subjects: Maturation or coming of age, Freedom, Values, Philosophy or philosophers, Cattle, Politics, Socialism, Teenagers, Gender roles, Nineteenth century, Middle classes, Poverty or poor people, Feminism, Women’s issues, Farms, farmers, or farming, Nationalism, Ambition, Disasters, Natural disasters, Ranches, ranchers, or ranching, Sheep, Australia or Australians, Droughts, Agnosticism, Dairy industry or products, Wilderness
- Locales: New South Wales, Australia
The Novel
Like most first novels, My Brilliant Career draws heavily on its author’s experience, and its verisimilitude was such that contemporaries judged it as a factual rather than fictional autobiography—an impression that a sequel, My Career Goes Bung (1954), did not entirely dispel.
In the introduction to the story, the author advises that the book is “all about myself.... I make no apologies for being egotistical. In this particular I attempt an improvement on other autobiographies.” She then cautions, “neither is it a novel, but simply a...
[The entire page is 2616 words long]
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