40 pages • 1 hour read
Miles (Stella) FranklinMy Brilliant Career
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1901A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-10Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary: “I Remember, I Remember”
Sybylla Melvyn’s earliest memories are not happy: While helping her father, a station agent named Dick, she is bitten by a black snake hiding in the ferns. Her father, in trying to help her, burned her fingers with his pipe. Young Sybylla loves her father. He is jovial, chatty, and happy: “He was my hero, confidant, encyclopedia, mate, and even my religion” (3). Her mother, on the other hand, worries over Sybylla’s tomboyish ways and her sharp tongue.
Chapter 2 Summary: “An Introduction to ‘Possum Gully”
When Sybylla is nine, her father decides to move the family to the farming country near ‘Possum Gully. Determined to make a fortune, Dick buys a 1000-acre sheep farm.
Chapter 3 Summary: “A Lifeless Life”
Sybylla is distressed because ‘Possum Gully seems very dull: “Nothing ever happened here” (4). The neighbors are friendly but poorly educated. In this backwater culture, Sybylla realizes, girls are expected to marry and have many children.
Her father’s carefree attitude, honesty, and friendliness—qualities that make him happy—are liabilities in the cutthroat livestock business. Dick is too “soft” (6). The farm loses money until Dick, hoping to make a profit selling butter, must secure a ruinous loan from the local Bishop to purchase milking cows. Dick begins to drink, and farm operations slip. Sybylla notices that her father becomes vicious with the farm animals.
Chapter 4 Summary: “A Career Which Soon Careened to an End”
As the farm starts to fail, a drought ensues. Sybylla’s mother approaches her to drop out of school and bring in some money through sewing or cooking. Sybylla detests her classmates and her indifferent teacher, who stinks of alcohol. The mother fears that Sybylla’s flip attitude and impatience might make finding work difficult. She also says Sybylla is too plain to expect marriage. Sybylla suggests singing, but the mother dismisses the idea. Thus, the girl thinks bitterly, there goes “my brilliant career” (10).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Disjointed Sketches and Grumbles”
As the drought continues, the cows start to die. Anxious, Sybylla watches her father drink more. When the Bishop’s agent calls in the loan, the family, unable to pay it, prepares to endure a public auction of their possessions.
A Drought Idyll
Sybylla and her father struggle to right their few remaining cows, which are stuck in a ditch and cannot pull themselves out. The afternoon work, in the blistering heat, wearies Sybylla. She decides, “[L]ife a curse” (11).
Chapter 6 Summary: “Revolt”
Sybylla’s grandmother, who lives in distant Caddagat, sends a letter asking that the girl come live with her for a few weeks to help out. The mother agrees, and Sybylla is put on a train.
Chapter 7 Summary: “Was E’er a Rose without Its Thorn?”
Determined to help the family, Sybylla, now 13, decides to try to write a novel to send off to a publisher. But the project stalls. She is not ready to be a writer: “I wish I would be dead” (14).
Chapter 8 Summary: “‘Possum Gully Left Behind, Hurrah! Hurrah!”
As the ride to her grandmother’s home unfolds, Sybylla takes stock of herself. She decides, given her ordinary intelligence and plain looks, she is doomed to a “little, empty humdrum life” (17). Overwhelmed, she decides, “[A] man with these notions is a curse to himself—but a woman? God help a woman of that description” (18).
Her grandmother’s house is spacious with a library full of books.
Chapter 9 Summary: “Aunt Helen’s Recipe”
Grandmother Lucy lives with two of her grown children: Aunt Helen, a woman abandoned by her husband years earlier, and Uncle Julius, a district magistrate. Helen tells Sybylla that she will be her project: “We will make you presentable” (23). Helen cautions Sybylla not to give in to any attention boys pay her, adding, “You will find that plain looks will not prevent you from gaining the friendship love of your fellows” (23).
Chapter 10 Summary: “Everard Grey”
A few days later, the family lawyer Everard Grey visits. He is gallant and aristocratic. Sybylla primps in the mirror and is happy with what she sees in the reflection: “I beheld a young girl with eyes of the clearest and brightest, and lips of brilliant scarlet, and a chest and pair of arms that would pass muster with the best” (27). At dinner, the attorney is taken by Sybylla; he encourages her to sing and then deliver a dramatic recitation. He tells her she is gifted and that with some mentoring she could have a career on stage. Sybylla recalls, “Flattery is sweet to youth. I felt pleased with myself and imagined…I was not half-bad looking” (29).
Chapters 1-10 Analysis
It is not often that a writer warns a reader even before starting the novel that “there is no plot in this story, because there has been none in my life or in any other life that has come under my notice” (2). This is the coming-of-age story of a sensitive and bold young girl who sees herself as a full-hearted, complicated woman and a promising artist trapped in a culture that respects neither women nor artists.
The novel is a loose memoir recollecting emotional events that led the author to renounce the life of marriage and family that everyone expects her to follow. It is a portrait of the writer as a young girl. In this, the novel plays with the familiar romance formula—a comely, sensitive, and rebellious young woman gamely pursues the challenge of getting married, only to decline the eventual proposal. Sybylla’s earliest memory—getting bitten by a snake she did not even see—foreshadows this struggle. Despite her misgivings about her appearance, her love-hate relationship with the girl she sees in the mirror, and her doubts over her market value as a wife, Sybylla fends off three marriage proposals. In this, the novel endorses a perception that, in this time and culture, would have been radical: A girl must be free to follow her own heart.
Two relationships define Sybylla in these chapters: her admiration for her father and her friendship with Aunt Helen. From her father, young Sybylla learns the difficult lessons that life and books are two radically different environments; that bad things happen to good people; that good people have unsuspected flaws; and that such misfortune lacks the kind of logic and reasoning that a person finds in a novel. From her aunt, she learns the difficult lesson that when such misfortune happens, the heart can endure, but it needs the steadying support of friendship.
The earliest memory of Dick Melvyn reveals what Sybylla comes to learn: Despite his noblest intentions and best efforts, everything her father tries fails. In trying to help his three-year-old daughter when the snake bites her, all he achieves is accidentally burning her with his pipe. When he moves the family to ‘Possum Gully, he intends to provide a satisfying life for his growing family. That the very things that make him such a happy person and a good father—his cheerfulness, happy-go-lucky optimism, willingness to trust others, and wonderful utopian idealism—make him vulnerable to others who use his unsuspecting nature to incrementally ruin him. Sybylla reaches the crushing realization that heroes are fallible people, prone to bad judgment and tragedy at the hands of misfortune and unscrupulous people. Watching her father collapse into alcoholism and dealing with her feelings of shame and embarrassment begin Sybylla’s maturation into adulthood. Learning that the world is a terrifying place also brings about her evolution into a writer. Recording these commonplace tragedies gives them meaning.
Aunt Helen’s impact is equally unexpected. Given that she is an abandoned wife, left by a cad of a husband for a much younger lover, readers of turn-of-the-century romances might expect her to be a sour and misanthropic Miss Havisham-styled recluse. Helen, however, provides Sybylla with yet another lesson in irony. The most emotionally scarred figure in her life, Helen offers Sybylla a crucial philosophy for surviving as a woman: Do not fret over looks, do not worry over money, and find a friend who connects with you on an honest, emotional level. She calls it “friendship” love. Even as she reveals to Sybylla her unsuspected beauty, Helen offers her the advice she needs to hear: “There is any amount of love and good in the world, but you must search for it” (23). Love, not passion, is out there, waiting to be found. It the kind of love sustained not by fervor or ego but rather by “respect” (23).
Unlike the young Sybylla who moves so easily between extremes of joy and despair, Helen does not surrender to a difficult and dark world. Betrayed by the man she loved and left to suffer the humiliation of seeing her husband living openly with his mistress, she refuses to surrender to bitterness. Yes, people suffer and hurt each other, but there is good in the world to be found. It is the very message Sybylla will celebrate when at the end of the novel she dedicates herself as a fledgling writer to look about her and find in the quiet and desperate lives of those around her the noble stuff of literature.
