My Brilliant Career

Miles Franklin

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.)

In conversation with

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.

Tina Kover is a literary translator. She studied French at the University of Denver and the University of Lausanne, Switzerland, and attended the Next Level Language Institute in Prague, Czech Republic. She holds a Master's Degree in Medieval and Renaissance Studies from Durham University. She is the translator of the forthcoming novel The Very Secretive and Passionate Stella Miles Franklin.