Review - My Brilliant Career

My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin

This is another of the 11 books that I have to read this semester, and have a presentation loosely on it this coming Tuesday.

In a nutshell:
Sybylla is 16 / 17 year old (for most of the book) living in various farms / ranches in the Australian outback in the 1890’s. She’s bitter and angry. Harold loves her and she tells him that she will not marry him. Because her father is in debt, she is later sent to those he owes money to work as a governess and teach some ignorant kids. She’s still bitter and angry. She later meets Harold again, still won’t marry him, and is still bitter and angry. She never has a brilliant career.

The good news is that the copy that I have starts on page 47, so there are 46 pages worth of introductions, notes and forwards which can be skipped over, as well as a hefty appendix in the back. So when I became bored on page 48 I felt somewhat accomplished, though still bored. The bad news, as you can probably tell from my ‘nutshell’, is that I really did not like it. It is a teenage feminist Australian-outback angry young girl’s story, where she is convinced that she is ugly, hates the idea of marriage and does little but complain for the entireity of the book. The main character is not appealing to a 21st century 20-something guy who does not like whiny little brats. Somewhere around the middle of the book I kept thinking that this girl seriously needs to get laid.

The book is a little too much like real life - nothing happens. She meets a guy, she says ‘no’. She meets him again, she still says ‘no’. The end. Although somewhere in the middle she did promise that she would marry him when she is 21. I guess that doesn’t happen. I now have to sit through a couple of lectures listening to the greatness of this dribble and why it is a work of brilliance. The lecturer also wonders why there aren’t enough guys in the class. It might be because all the previous book-lists have been about whiny little feminists living in a world where things kinda happen but they still don’t do much about it.

2 books down, 9 more to go.