'My Brilliant Career': How a Teenager Wrote Australia's Classic Novel

Miles Franklin published My Brilliant Career in 1901, when she was just 21 years old. Set in 19th-century rural Australia, the semiautobiographical novel follows Sybylla Melvyn, an ambitious young woman who bucks the traditional expectations of marriage and monotony to embrace the adventurous, artistic life of a writer.

Author Madeleine Watts recalls exactly where she was when she first read My Brilliant Career at age 15. “I remember sitting there and finishing it and thinking, ‘I’ve read this at exactly the right time and exactly when I needed to read it.” Watts, who later became an award-winning writer herself, says it’s hard to overstate the book’s prominence in Australian literary culture. 

More than a century after its publication, My Brilliant Career remains a cultural touchstone. Critics heralded the 1979 film adaptation, directed by Gillian Armstrong, as a classic of Australian feminist cinema and a new series adaptation comes to Netflix in August 2026.

“I think if you were to ask a lot of Australians who aren’t big readers what a classic Australian novel is, I think that’s the one they would pick,” Watts says. “It is interesting because most Australian literary culture and most arts culture is incredibly blokey, it’s incredibly male,” she adds. “It’s sort of this weird anomaly that this book written by a woman has become so important.” 

Franklin grew up in the then-rural New South Wales, at the foot of the Snowy Mountains. She set My Brilliant Career in the familiar landscapes of her childhood, exploring the changing region and characters of the Australian bush.

She showed artistic promise at a very young age, and several influential writing teachers encouraged her to take her gifts seriously. Franklin kept a meticulous diary throughout much of her life, recording her everyday experiences, literary ambitions and even hopes for other Australian writers. 

“There’s something about the intensity of the emotions she’s able to capture," says Watts, who sees the youth and vim of the teenage novelist shine through the pages of Franklin’s debut novel.

“My sphere in life is not congenial to me,” Sybylla declares in the opening pages of My Brilliant Career, before describing the prospect of spending her youth there as a “living death.”

On her family’s drought-stricken dairy farm in New South Wales, Franklin squeezed her literary ambitions around the demands of rural life, writing much of My Brilliant Career at age 19 in the evenings after finishing her farm chores. 

The timing of the novel’s publication was also significant. That same year, Australia’s six colonies federated to form a new nation. The decade leading up to Federation had brought economic depression and labor unrest. It was also a period of profound change for Australian women, who were pushing for greater access to education, professions and political life. South Australian women had won the right to vote in 1894 and federal suffrage followed in 1902. 

Franklin’s story reflected many of those tensions on an intimate scale as Sybylla’s struggle to imagine a life for herself beyond marriage unfolds. Her fierce attachment to Australia reflects the aspirations of a young country in the process of defining a national identity. 

Franklin built an independent life around writing, travel and activism. Five years after publishing My Brilliant Career, she moved to Chicago, where she continued her writing. She worked as an editor and secretary for the Women’s Trade Union League, an organization dedicated to advancing women’s rights in the workplace. In 1909, she published her second novel, Some Everyday Folk and Dawn. 

In the thick of World War I, Franklin moved to England to work as a nurse. Afterward, she joined the women’s housing movement, working with the National Housing and Town Planning Association in London. In 1927, she moved back to Australia and returned to themes of life in the Australian countryside. She wrote a series of novels under pseudonyms, worrying that My Brilliant Career would overshadow anything new. 

Her experiences abroad inspired her 1933 novel Bring the Monkey and her 1936 novel All That Swagger, both of which she published under her own name. 

While the feminist characters and themes might have shocked some of Franklin’s contemporaries, Watts says, parts of My Brilliant Career might not read as modern to today’s readers. “It’s easy to reclaim it as a feminist text but there are things about it I find grating,” she says. “I find a lot of that Australian nationalism stuff is a bit dated.”  

After the success of My Brilliant Career, Franklin tried to publish a sequel, provocatively titled The End of My Career, later known as My Career Goes Bung. She’d been frustrated by the ways people tried to read memoir-like details into her first novel. Her sequel took a much sharper, satirical look at Australian society. It wasn’t published until 1946, eight years before Franklin’s death in 1954. One historian described it as “no more than echo” of My Brilliant Career. 

Still, Sybylla’s restless ambition—and her determination to imagine a life beyond the one prescribed for her—has continued to resonate with generations of readers and writers for more than a century. Today, one of Australia's most prominent literary awards bears Franklin’s name. For writers like Watts, that legacy has helped make room for generations of Australian women to tell stories of their own.