My Brilliant Career

Follow wild-haired Sybylla as she picks up her pen to try and write her way out of oppressive poverty in rural Australia, her father's drinking debts, and obscene marriage proposals that simply cramp her style. Miles Franklin is Australia's progressive literary star!

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My Brilliant Career (1901) is a landmark of Australian feminist literature and a true testament to the electric energy of teen girl ambition and woe. Drawing heavily on the author's own life, it offers a vivid and sometimes unsparing portrait of rural Australia in the late 19th century.

Sybylla Melvyn's father has squandered the family's fortunes through reckless speculation and descended into alcoholism, leaving them to scrape a living from a failing dairy farm. Sybylla is sharp, ambitious, and desperate for a life beyond her circumstances -- she dreams of books, music, and becoming a writer. A spell with more prosperous relatives brings welcome relief and the romantic attention of wealthy neighbor Harold Beecham, but her fierce independence makes the dusty path to true love anything but smooth.
Originally published under a name ambiguous enough to pass as male, her legacy lives on in Australia's most prestigious literary prize, the Miles Franklin Award, and its companion prize, the Stella, which celebrates fiction by women. While the new Netflix series drops August 2026, we also recommend Gillian Armstrong's award-winning 1979 film adaptation.
(Netflix sticker, included, though it easily peels off.)

Author: Miles Franklin
Publisher: Smith & Taylor Classics
Published: 07/28/2026
Pages: 295
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.60lbs
Size: 7.70h x 4.90w x 0.90d
ISBN: 9781961884755

About the Author
Franklin, Miles: -

Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin (1879-1954) was born in Old Talbingo, Australia. Despite a difficult and isolated childhood -- she grew up in the impoverished bush regions of New South Wales, with limited education she completed her first book at the age of just nineteen. The ironically titled My Brilliant Career (1901) was published under a male pseudonym, to immediate success and acclaim. Its story of an impassioned, ambitious heroine frustrated by rural bush life resonated with young Australian women and established Franklin as a bold new feminist voice in literature. Following the publication of her debut novel, Franklin moved to Sydney, then on to America and Britain. She wrote and published a total of nineteen books across her lifetime, as well as working as an editor and women's advocate in organisations such as the National Women's Trade Union League. Her endowment of a major literary award -- the Miles Franklin Award -- has consolidated her legacy in Australian literary life.

Davies, Kerrie: -

Kerrie Davies is the author of Miles Franklin Undercover, released March 2025 (Allen & Unwin), available in the U.S. November 2025. Her previous book, A Wife's Heart, created national discussion about the poet Henry Lawson & his marriage. She has appeared at the Sydney Writers' Festival, Brisbane Writers Festival & the National Folk Festival. A former journalist, Kerrie was a visiting fellow at the State Library NSW and is Senior Lecturer at the School of the Arts Media, UNSW Sydney. Kerrie writes for the Conversation, and lives on the NSW North Coast and Sydney.

Kover, Tina: -

Tina Kover is the translator of over thirty books from French, including Anne Berest's The Postcard, Négar Djavadi's Disoriental, and Emmelie Prophète's Blue. Her work has won the Albertine Prize, the French Voices Award, and the Lambda Literary Award, and has been shortlisted for the (U.S.) National Book Award, the International Dublin Literary Award, the PEN Translation Prize, the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize, and the Scott Moncrieff Prize. She leads workshops for the American Literary Translators Association and masterclasses in literary translation for Durham University. She is also the co-founder of Translators Aloud, a YouTube channel that features literary translators reading from their own work. She lives in Durham, UK.

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