Netflix’s ‘My Brilliant Career’ is a brilliantly relatable story about a young woman rejecting society’s expectations and fiercely pursuing her dreams. But what makes Sybylla Melvyn’s story so much more fascinating is that it is actually deeply personal to the young woman who created her.
‘My Brilliant Career’ is based on Miles Franklin’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, which is considered one of Australia’s earliest feminist classics. Much like her fictional heroine, Franklin was also a young woman determined to build her life around writing rather than marriage. Sybylla’s fight for independence mirrors that of Franklin’s own journey as an author.
The True Inspiration Behind Sybylla
At the centre of ‘My Brilliant Career’, we find Sybylla Melvyn, who refuses to accept marriage as her ultimate purpose in life. She comes from a once-prosperous British-Australian farming family that has fallen on hard times.
While her family is desperate to find her a rich husband, Sybylla has an entirely different ambition. She wants to become a writer. So, we follow her as she goes to live with her grandmother at a sprawling country estate. Here, she is expected to find a suitable, wealthy husband. Instead, Sybylla sees it as an opportunity to gain new experiences and pursue her writing career.
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This ambition closely mirrors the life of her creator, Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin. Franklin was determined to become a writer and resisted the domestic expectations placed upon women. She never married and was committed to building an independent life.
She wrote ‘My Brilliant Career’ when she was just 19 years old. Despite much pressure and limitations, she finished the manuscript by 1899 but her path to publication was far from straightforward.
After facing multiple rejections from publishers, Franklin eventually sent the manuscript to her literary hero, poet Henry Lawson. He recognised its potential and helped secure its publication.
Miles Franklin Had Her Own Brilliant Career To Fight For
Franklin’s life after ‘My Brilliant Career’ was not an easy journey to independence. Rather than immediately becoming a successful full-time author, she had to take several different paths that provided her a living. This included nursing and working as a housemaid.
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But at the same time, she was also writing and contributing pieces to ‘The Daily Telegraph’ and ‘The Sydney Morning Herald’, using pseudonyms like “An Old Bachelor” and “Vernacular.”
Her experiences would lead her to create ‘My Career Goes Bung’, a follow-up novel in which Sybylla encounters Sydney’s literary world and tries to find a place in it. Once again, it mirrored Franklin’s own difficulties as a woman trying to establish herself as a serious writer.
Ultimately, ‘My Brilliant Career’ is a celebration of Franklin’s achievement of refusing marriage, wealth and social expectations to determine her future. Instead, she fights to build her own brilliant career on her own terms.
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