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Title: My Brilliant Career / My Career Goes Bung by Miles Franklin ISBN: 0-207-18695-2 Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Pub. Date: 01 June, 1992 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: This Brilliant Book
Comment: These books are not really meant to go together. When she was sixteen years old, Miles Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career, A NOVEL, but was plagued for years by people who believed that this book was an autobiography. Some people continued to insist it was, or even misrepresent it as such even after being personally informed by Miles Franklin that the book was a novel. Finally, Miles Franklin withdrew My Brilliant Career from publication, and in the fifties, wrote My Career Goes Bung as a response to those who continued to believe that My Brilliant Career was an autobiography. My Career Goes Bung is a parody of the literary world, not a sequel to My Brilliant Career, and frankly, if you read it immediately after, it will probably spoil the magic of My Brilliant Career for you.

That said, here is my review of My Brilliant Career:

The is a beautiful and startling book. Written by Miles Franklin in 1901, when she was just sixteen, it is the story of a young girl, Sybylla Melvyn, trying to live her own life in Possum Gully, Australia. She doesn't want to marry, and repeat her mother's life. She'd like to travel, but she has no money. She's bright, but her prospects for college are non-existent. More than anything, she would like to be an artist, but not because she has a passion for any particular artistic expression; she just likes her imagined idea of an artist's lifestyle.

She has a brief respite when she goes to live with her grandmother, and meets Harold Beecham, who becomes her best friend. She also gets to know her Aunt Helen, "neither maid, nor widow, nor wife," who cautions her of the dangers of marrying for love. Sybylla wonders why she should marry at all. If she had a fortune, she declares, she would give it gladly to someone she loved, but "the word wife finished [her] up."

Life has tougher things in store for Sybylla, but she is a survivor, and she begins to write. She masters metaphor: "If the souls of our lives were voiced in music, there are some that none but a great organ could express, others the clash of a full orchestra, a few...the...exquisite sadness of a violin..., and mine could be told with a couple of nails in a rusty tin pot."

Maybe she writes because of what she knows, or maybe she has insight because she writes, but Sybylla, from Possum Gully, to genteel Caddagat and Five-Bob Downs, to the muddy M'Swat farm, and back to Possum Gully, knows classism, demagoguery, democracy, socialism, feminism, and cynicism.

Sybylla is a joy to know. I can't recommend this book more.

Rating: 5
Summary: Deserving of wider popularity
Comment: It's hard to believe that this novel was written by a young woman in her teens. it's even harder to believe that it was written in the late nineteenth century. So much for Victorian attitudes... Sybylla rages against her parents, shuns marriage in favor of a career, sees classism and injustice as it truly is, and at one point questions the exuistence of God. The result is an entertaining story. Sybylla is a worthy literary sister to Anne of Green Gables, or the March sisters. The story has a little less of the innocence to it, but all of the charm. The description of 1890's Australia are vivid, as are all the people Sybylla meets (and those great Australian geographic names.)

Try and find a copy of this book... and then demand it go back into print! You won't regret reading this, and you'll enjoy it wholeheartedly. (Beware, My career Goes Bung is not a "true" sequel, and can easily be skipped without missing anything.)