My Brilliant Career

My Brilliant Career - Miles Franklin

"My Brilliant Career was the first of Miles Franklin's novels and, if it lacks the breadth of her later books, is the most striking and clear-cut of them all, with something wild and Bronteish in its picture of a young girl hungering for life and love in the harsh outback plains of New South Wales.

"Banned by the author herself from republication for ten years after her death in 1954, this vivid little Australian Classic was originally published in Edinburgh in 1901.

"The author's objections to republication were not based on doubt about the merit of the book, but on the distress she felt when a work of fiction was taken to be direct autobiography. Much of it, we may say today, is clearly based on fact; but obviously the facts have been changed, enlarged, dramatized, and lit with imagination to make a work of art.

"Henry Lawson and A.G. Stephens combined to greet it with enthusiasm when it first appeared. Nor should it lack appreciation today, for underneath its extravagances and its melodrama, which have their own charm of period, Miles Franklin's spirit flashes indomitably; and in its picture of country life and in its image of the rebelliousness of youth there remains an abiding vitality."