He wrote to David Scott Mitchell, 'I've got a bush novel, sent to me by .... In his book, In a Critical Condition, published in 1984, John Docker gives an entertaining ...
SUSAN SHERIDAN
My Brilliant Career: The Career of the Career
F
rom the perspective of 200 I, this book appears to have appeared on the scene at exactly the right time - it was Federation year, women all over Australia were about to get the vote, and many ' brilliant careers ' were expected from young women of Stella Miles Franklin ' s generation. Yet the career of the Career has been a chequered one, in terms of both its publication history, and its critical reputation. The novel was first published by Blackwood, of Edinburgh and London - not an Australian publisher, wrote A.G. Stephens, for ' the local audience whom it will interest is too scanty' (although see Webby in this issue). Franklin had sent the manuscript to Henry Lawson, who had immediately guessed that ' Miles Franklin ' might be female . He wrote to David Scott Mitchell, ' I' ve got a bush novel, sent to me by a young girl, which I think beats Jane Eyre or the African Farm' . When Lawson arrived in London he passed on the manuscript to his literary agent J.B. Pinker, who sent the manuscript to Blackwoods. The book appeared some months later, without the ' (?)' in the title, and also without a number of passages, probably on religion and the ' sex problem' (Webby, Introduction). My Brilliant Career was met with enthusiasm by most British reviewers, and Lawson, who was still in London, collected a number of these reviews and sent them to Franklin (Roderick 79). Reviews in Australia repeated this praise, but added a delighted appreciation of the book' s fidelity to Australianness. ' A Bookful of Sunlight' was the title of A.G . Stephens' s review in the Bulletin' s Red Page. Greeted with praise and affection, the novel brought its young author both fame and embarrassment, as a number of contributors to this special issue of ALS point out. For many years, consequently, the novel was out of print. Even when its sequel, My Career Goes Bung, was finally published in 1946 (after languishing in a trunk for forty years), Franklin refused to allow Angus and Robertson to republi sh My Brilliant Career; and her will prevented it from being rep ubi ished for a further ten years after her death (in 1954). Though out of print, the novel was not forgotten. Nettie Palmer called it ' one of the most emphatic moves in the direction of confidence as opposed to colonisation ', comparing it (as Henry Lawson had) with Olive Schreiner' s Story of an African Farm: ' the reading public of Australia will ransack old libraries' to find it, she wrote (Smith 421 ). Some thirty years later, when My Brilliant Career finally reappeared in 1965 under Angus and Robertson's imprint, Brian Elliott, a pioneer of teaching Australian Literature in universities, remarked that 'this book hardly needs an introduction : it is enough to mention that it is available again '. Notwithstanding this comment, Elliott wrote only a brief paragraph on the book in his ABR review, being mainly concerned with praising Barbara
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Baynton's Bush Studies, which had been reprinted by Angus and Robertson at the same time (Elliott 134). Since the publication of this A&R edition, My Brilliant Career has been continuously available, a rare thing for an Australian title - even one that is now considered a national icon, one of 'the books that made us' (Slattery 2). The most recent edition of the novel is in Angus and Robertson's Australian Classics series, which was published to mark the centenary of publication. Such an overtly feminist book has had its share of detractors, inevitably. Colin Roderick dismissed Franklin's own account of why the novel was not republished during her lifetime, asserting that ' the book ran its normal course and was duly discarded along with thousands of other novels of equally mediocre literary quality. It coasted along before a coincidental breeze of feminism, then fell into the doldrums and stayed there waiting for the next puff of wind. The next breeze took eighty years to arrive' (84). But the next 'breeze' of feminism brought Margaret Fink and Gillian Armstrong's enormously successful film My Brilliant Career, and it was the film that probably made the novel's international publication possible. In 1980 Carmen Callil at Virago published My Brilliant Career, writing the introductory essay herself; this edition was also published by Lester and Orpen Dennys in Toronto. In the same year St Martin's Press in New York published Franklin's book, and 1981 brought reviews in the Spectator, the New York Times and the New York Times Book Review. Further international editions appeared, including the Folio Society edition (London, 1983) with an Introduction by Joan Aiken. Franklin's novel has been translated into Japanese and French, and is also available in Braille and on several sound recordings. My Brilliant Career was greeted by A.G. Stephens, in his 1903 review, as 'the very first Australian novel to be published'. He went on: 'the author has the Australian mind, she speaks Australian language, utters Australian thoughts, and looks at things from an Australian point of view absolutely'. After this hyperbolic attribution of national significance, it hardly mattered that Stephens went on to add that 'the book is not a notable Iiterary performance'. Yet he did recognise its other major claim to fame, that it represented the many 'lively, dreamy Australian girls' who 'yearn, they aspire for what they know not; but it is essentially a yearning for a fuller, stronger life', for action. Twenty years after its first appearance, Nettie Palmer named My Brilliant Career as one ofthe significant novels of the early twentieth century: a vehement, irregular and somehow unforgettable tale of a young woman's life in a country district ofNew South Wales. At the time, and later, it had its own success, but it was not what the circulating library expects a novel to be. It lit up a new landscape by showing what manner of human beings could be tortured or enraptured under the sky. (Palmer 13-14)
However, by the time the novel was reprinted in the 1960s, the literary nationalism with which Franklin had been so closely associated in the thirties, forties and fifties was being vigorously challenged by a new generation of academic critics. Even at the beginning of the sixties, in H.M. Green's History of 331
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Australian Literature, we can see the point of interest shifting from the book's 'Australianness ' to the psychological profile of its protagonist: Sybylla .. . seems to have all the makings of a neurotic, if not a psychotic personality, but one has the impression that she is the feminine equivalent of one of Lawson's 'hatters', driven from her moorings not by any innate defect, but by being trapped in utter mental loneliness. Yet she has humour, if it is sometimes cynical, and at times high spirits (I: 694).
For Green, Franklin's distinctive style has little to recommend it, being 'sometimes excruciating: stiff, clumsy, formal, full of lapses in English and melodramatic cliches', he wrote (see Webby in this issue for discussion of this point). He then added one of his characteristically generous concessions - ' but through them struggles a rich vernacular .... ' (1: 693). 'Literary quality' was by now taken very seriously, particularly by academic critics (which Green was said not to be), and 'quality' was defined in strongly moral and psychological terms. Exemplifying this style of literary criticism, the Oxford History of Australian Literature had this to say of My Brilliant Career in 1981: [It] is certainly the freshest and most memorable of [Franklin's] many books ... Sybylla is self-conscious, matter-of-fact, egotistical ... Yet she has more than a touch of unpleasantness in her nature, and eventually she ceases to be attractive to the reader, and becomes tiresome ... [H]er passionate convictions are without a rationally coherent basis, and there is considerable doubt about the book's emotional coherence (I 02).
Behind this aesthetic and moral judgement lay a modernist account of Australian fiction, in which Franklin was regarded as a sentimental nationalist whose bush sagas were stuck in the 1890s. From the mid fifties until the late seventies was probably the period of greatest obscurity for My Brilliant Career. For the literary nationalists, too, the novel faded from sight. In the 1950s, Vance Palmer (The Legend of the Nineties) and A.A. Phillips (The Australian Tradition) rewrote the legend of the 1890s as an entirely masculine affair in which the only woman writer to be remembered was Barbara Baynton. My Brilliant Career received only the merest mention in the influential 1964 collection of critical essays The Literature of Australia, edited by Geoffrey Dutton, and seems to have been entirely neglected in John Barnes' collection of historical documents in The Writer in Australia (1969). In his book, In a Critical Condition, published in 1984, John Docker gives an entertaining account of the ' battle of the books' that pitted literary nationalist critics against academic formalists. Miles Franklin becomes a touchstone in his critique of an influential anthology, The 1890s, edited by Leon Cantrell in 1977, which he accused of perpetuating a 'doom and gloom' thesis of Australian life and of the 1890s in particular. Docker notes that some pages from My Brilliant Career, on the rigours of selector life on drought-stricken farms, are included in the anthology. But this, he argues, hardly represents ' the major concern of the novel: a feminist exploration of the possibilities or lack of possibilities, for an independent life for young women in Australian rural society, selector or 332
T HE CAREER OF TH E CA REER
squatter, outside of marriage'. He notes the echoes of Ibsen in a passage between Sybylla and Harold, and points out that the whole debate on women ' s rights is omitted from Cantrell ' s version ofthe 1890s (Docker 138-39). It is ironic that the nadir of the Career's reputation among the literary academic establishment- the somewhat anachronistic Oxford History appeared in 1981 -coincided with the appearance of the film which gave the Career its widest audience ever, and spurred several more editions of the book. Although Dorothy Green, in her 1984 addendum to H.M . Green's account of Franklin, was of the opinion that the screen version of the novel exaggerates the heroine' s feminist aspirations, the film offered an interpretation of Sybylla' s dilemma that anticipated, and probably inspired, some of the feminist readings of the novel that began to appear in the 1980s. Among reviews of the 1981 British and American editions, Caroline Moorhead in the Spectator linked My Brilliant Career with two other Virago Modern Classics by an Australian woman writer who had decided to adopt a male pseudonym, Henry Handel Richardson ' s Maurice Guest and The Getting of Wisdom . These were acclaimed as long-lost classics of Australian writing whose authors shared a critical perspective on the ' confined snobberies of Australian society'. But whereas this reviewer saw Sybylla protecting herself with a series of ' sardonic pleasantries' (24), her counterpart in the New York Times attacked the heroine ' s ' mixture of self-satisfaction and frustrated vanity, of petulant idealism and perpetual complaint'. Phyllis Rose calls the book an ' adolescent fantasy' , in which stilted dialogue is matched by an ideology of ' watered-down Byronic romanticism ' . ' Should it really be the hope of feminists that this inadvertently funny novel be taken as a serious portrayal of the female plight?' she asks. It seems that Sybylla' s sardonic exuberance - not to mention the 'girlishly emotional ' parts of the book that had so embarrassed Henry Lawsonstill had the capacity to upset those who like their literature to be seemly. In criticism, Drusilla Modjeska's Exiles at Home (1981) set out the historical and literary contexts in which Franklin and her sister writers operated, from 1925 to 1945 . In a more literary-critical vein, Frances Mclnherny offered a challenging interpretation of My Brilliant Career in which the psychology of Sybylla' s rebellion is placed in its social and cultural contexts as a rebellion against patriarchal power. This essay appeared in Shirley Walker' s 1983 collection of essays on women and femininity in Australian literature, Who Is She ?, the subtitle of which marked the increasing interest in ' images of women' in Australian literature, if not feminist criticism per se. More significantly, perhaps, Franklin was the only woman writer to score two essays in Carole Ferrier's important feminist collection, Gender, Politics and Fiction that appeared two years later - one on My Brilliant Career by South African critic Susan Gardner, the other by Valerie Kent on Franklin's literary aliases. With the proliferation of Australian publications around the bicentenary year of 1988, Franklin and My Brilliant Career featured prominently in several surveys and essay collections on women writers commissioned by Dale Spender, and in my own discussion of My Brilliant Career in the context of both the 333
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feminism and the nationalism of the 1890s. Scholarship interested in social history and popular culture encouraged a renewed interest in that decade; the increasing influence of post-colonial criticism re-invigorated approaches to literature of the colonial period and its aftermath . In these contexts, My Brilliant Career occupies a pivotal place in a series of critical debates about genre, nation , and gender. In Laurie Hergenhan ' s New ｌｩｴ･ｲ｡ｾｹ＠ History of Australia, therefore, there were references to My Brilliant Career in six of the essays, a score exceeded only by Joseph Furphy' s Such is Life, Henry Handel Richardson's The Fortunes of Richard Mahony, and Marcus Clarke' s His Natural Life. 1 New ways of thinking about autobiography have provided yet another context in which My Brilliant Career can be considered, and the novel occupies an important place among Australian texts in studies by Joy Hooton and Gillian Whitlock. In several recent literary histories and companions, My Brilliant Career is perhaps more prominent than it has ever been . In the Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature (2000), My Brilliant Career makes an appearance in ' Colonial Writers and Readers '; as one of three key Federation texts in 'Fiction from 1900 to 1970'; as an autobiographical text; and as the occasion of a founding moment in Australian literary criticism, A .G . Stephens' review in the Bulletin. In the Oxford History Literary History of Australia the novel gets a mention in five of the chapters: in the essay on film , television and literature by Graeme Turner; as an example of the female ' development of the artist' novel or Kiinstlerroman by Carole Ferrier; as rejecting a traditional feminine education, in Delys Bird ' s chapter on colonial Australia; and as introducing Franklin ' s 1930s nationalism in the essay by Jennifer Strauss. Susan Martin's subtle reading brings together many of the current critical insights into this book. She sees it as combining romance with bush nationalism ; attempting to find a position for a female subject in an increasingly masculine country; and producing an individual, Sybylla Melvyn, whose middle-class status is threatened, defining herself through the appropriation of ' working-class ' ideals. As fragmented and contradictory as the narrative is in some ways, it is more coherent in its narration of a homogenised ' Anglo-Celtic Australian self versus the threatening others. Even more than Baynton ' s work, it is neither with nor fully against the preceding ' female ' tradition in Australia, and the increasingly powerful, ' nationalist' authentic masculin(ist) tradition. (Martin I 0 1-2) I would offer Martin ' s assessment of the novel as evidence of the triumph of the career of the Career - an appreciation of its di stinctive ambivalence, its mixed feminist and nationalist agendas, and its intuitive anticipation of many ofthe key shifts in discourse that would produce definitions of Australianness for the new century. If it is one of ' the books that made us ', as newspaper commentator Luke Slattery asserts, it is also a book that continues to make us, as each generation rereads it in the light of their own urgent questions.
Other novels th at rate six menti ons are Rando lph Stow' s The Merry-go-Round in the Sea and M. Barnard Eldershaw ' s To morrow and Tomorrow.
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WORKS CITED Bennett, Bruce and Jennifer Strauss, eds. The Oxford Literary History of Australia. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1998. Docker, John. In a Critical Condition. Ringwood: Penguin, 1984. Elliott, Brian. 'The Backward Glance.' Australian Book Review 5.7 (May 1966): 134-5. Ferrier, Carole, ed. Gender, Politics and Fiction. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 1985. Franklin, Miles. Laughter, Notfor a Cage. Pymble, NSW: Angus & Robertson, 1954. Green, Dorothy, ed. H.M. Green's History of Australian Literature. 2 vols. Rev. ed. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1985. Hergenhan, Laurie, ed. The Penguin New Literary History of Australia. Ringwood, Vic.: Penguin, 1988. Hooton, Joy. Stories of Herself When Young: Autobiographies of Childhood by Australian Women. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1990. Kramer, Leonie, ed. The Oxford History of Australian Literature. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1981. Martin, Susan K. 'National Dress or National Trousers?' Bruce Bennett and Jennifer Strauss, eds. The Oxford Literary History of Australia. Melbourne: Oxford UP, 1998. Modjeska, Drusilla. Exiles at Home. Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1981. Moorhead, Caroline. 'Unmasked.' The Spectator 20 June, 1981: 24-25. Palmer, Nettie. Modern Australian Literature (1900-1923). Melbourne and Sydney: Lothian, 1924. Palmer, Vance. The Legend of the Nineties. Melbourne: Melbourne UP, 1954. Phillips, A.A. The Australian Tradition: Studies in a Colonial Culture. Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1958. Roderick, Colin. Miles Franklin: Her Brilliant Career. Adelaide: Rigby, 1982. Rose, P. 'Her So-So Career.' New York Times Book Review 4 January, 1981: 8, 21. Sheridan, Susan. 'Louisa Lawson, Miles Franklin and Feminist Writing, 1888-1901.' Australian Feminist Studies 7- 8 (1988): 29-47. Slattery, Luke. 'The Books That Made Us.' Weekend Australian Review 19-20 August, 1995: 1-2. Smith, Vivian, ed. Nettie Palmer. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 1988. Spender, Dale. Writing a New World. London: Pandora, 1988. Stephens, A.G. 'A Bookful of Sunlight.' The Bulletin 28 September, 190 I. The Red Page. Walker, Shirley, ed. Who Is She?: images of Women in Australian Fiction. St Lucia, Qld: U ofQueensland P, 1983. Webby, Elizabeth, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. - - . Introduction. My Brilliant Career. Angus & Robertson, 200 I. Whitlock, Gillian. 'From Biography to Autobiography.' The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2000. 232-57.
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