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View allMy Brilliant Career
Franklin
1901
A teenage girl in the bush declares her ambition — and refuses the ending the marriage plot demands.
My Brilliant Career
Miles Franklin · 1901
Miles Franklin wrote this at twenty-one and published it in 1901, and it reads like it: headlong, funny, self-mocking, and furious about exactly how little room a poor, plain, ambitious girl was given in colonial Australia. Sybylla Melvyn narrates her own life the way Franklin insisted on living hers — refusing the romance the era expected of her — which is why the book still gets claimed as a feminist landmark of Australian letters more than a century on.
40 chapters · 88,092 words · ~6.7 hr read
Contents
Chapters
Henry Lawson's preface and Miles Franklin's own dedication "to my fellow Australians" open the book before Sybylla Melvyn takes over the telling — thirty-eight chapters of bush poverty, thwarted ambition, and a girl who insists her story needs no romance to be worth reading.
- 1Preface~1 min
- 2Introduction~2 min
- 3Chapter 3~6 min
- 4Chapter 4~4 min
- 5Chapter 5~7 min
- 6Chapter 6~7 min
- 7Chapter 7~13 min
- 8Chapter 8~12 min
- 9Chapter 9~16 min
- 10Chapter 10~16 min
- 11Chapter 11~12 min
- 12Chapter 12~14 min
- 13Chapter 13~13 min
- 14Chapter 14~10 min
- 15Chapter 15~14 min
- 16Chapter 16~10 min
- 17Chapter 17~8 min
- 18Chapter 18~12 min
- 19Chapter 19~17 min
- 20Chapter 20~4 min
- 21Chapter 21~13 min
- 22Chapter 22~14 min
- 23Chapter 23~8 min
- 24Chapter 24~14 min
- 25Chapter 25~13 min
- 26Chapter 26~7 min
- 27Chapter 27~8 min
- 28Chapter 28~14 min
- 29Chapter 29~5 min
- 30Chapter 30~12 min
- 31Chapter 31~20 min
- 32Chapter 32~9 min
- 33Chapter 33~13 min
- 34Chapter 34~5 min
- 35Chapter 35~7 min
- 36Chapter 36~11 min
- 37Chapter 37~8 min
- 38Chapter 38~17 min
- 39Chapter 39~6 min
- 40Chapter 40~4 min