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 11-17Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary: “Yah!”
By the next morning, Sybylla’s elation passes. “You hideous animal,” she says in the mirror. “Your peerless conceit does you credit” (29). At breakfast, she mentions Everard’s encouragement to pursue a life on stage, and her grandmother dismisses the idea of her having a career “instead of being a good wife and mother and attending to a home” (30). Everard Grey arrives. He promises to secure a talent agent and pledges his love. Sybylla refuses: “There is no such thing as love” (33).
Everard departs the next morning.
Chapter 12 Summary: “One Grand Passion”
Frank Hawden, who runs the farm, approaches Sybylla and proposes to her, telling her that when he reaches 24 he will inherit his family’s farm in England. Sybylla dismisses the idea as a “screaming farce” (33). Frank complains to her grandmother who tells Sybylla that she could do much worse than Frank Hawden. Sybylla dismisses Hawden as no “fit husband” (34). She would not listen to “professions of love from an angel” (35), much less from a man who works with livestock.
Chapter 13 Summary: “He”
The next day, while on a ladder pulling lemons from a tree, Sybylla meets Harry Beechum, her “first, last and only real sweetheart” (35). Coming up behind her, Harry, thinking Sybylla is a servant, says, “You are a mighty fine shaped filly” (36) and teases her for a kiss. She dodges him. Later, when they are formally introduced at lunch, Harry apologizes for his “Don Juan” behavior (38). Sybylla is taken by his height, sunburned features, and cool confidence. He is there to buy two bullocks, but he lingers and walks with Sybylla in the garden. He departs but returns three days later for dinner. Sybylla notices how “fearfully, wonderfully quiet” (39) he is and how that quiet belies a grasping intelligence. Sybylla is happy. She recalls, “Life was so pleasant that I was content merely to be young, a chit in the first flush of teens, health, hope, and happiness” (42).
Chapter 14 Summary: “Principally Letters”
Days pass. Sybylla notices the stream of homeless people wandering the road looking for food. Sybylla asks her uncle, the judge, how God-fearing Christians can ignore these “homeless, hopeless, aimless, shameless” souls (41).
Chapter 15 Summary: “When the Heart Is Young”
A letter arrives from Five-Bob Downs, the Beechum farm. Harry’s spinster aunt asks if she may borrow Sybylla to help out for a week or two. Harry arrives in a carriage to pick up Sybylla.
Chapter 16 Summary: “When Fortune Smiles”
Harry’s aunt welcomes Sybylla. The next day, Harry invites Sybylla to go for a row on the river. First, he must shoe the horse, and Sybylla helps, admiring his handling of the testy horse. The boat is tiny, and Harry cautions Sybylla about making any sudden moves, which, teasingly, she does. The boat capsizes. Harry helps Sybylla to the riverbank, and the two sneak back to the house and change clothes, laughing all the way. After dinner, Harry plays the piano, and Sybylla feels happy: “What a warmhearted place is the world, full of pleasure, good, and beauty, when fortune smiles” (46).
Chapter 17 Summary: “Idylls of Youth”
Over the next several days, Sybylla and Harry spend much time together. They talk, laugh, and dance. Upon returning to Caddagat, she feels “like a creature of joy” (49). She volunteers to go with Frank to Dogtrap for the weekly trip to pick up the mail, hoping each time to run into Harry. When Sybylla proposes she go to Dogtrap alone, the grandmother refuses. So, when Sybylla and Frank depart in the carriage and Frank gets out to unlatch a gate, Sybylla whips the horse and heads off alone at breakneck speed.
When she arrives at Dogtrap, she meets Harry who is concerned about the horse’s sweaty condition and a crack he notices in the harness. He demands he hook up his horse to Sybylla’s carriage and two ride back together. Sybylla declines, but Harry climbs next to her, taking the reins. She petulantly and teasingly says she would rather walk and starts off on foot. Harry gets down, lifts her up, and carries her back to the carriage. He drops her off when the farm is in sight, unharnesses his horse, and departs. “Thank you for being so officious,” she teases (51). Her grandmother upbraids Sybylla for playing such a dangerous trick on Frank.
Chapters 11-17 Analysis
In these chapters, Sybylla feels the first confusing impulses of love. Like any sensitive teenager, Sybylla is uncertain of her value and thus finds the attention of men intent on marrying her at the age of 16 at once exhilarating and unsettling. As her confrontational dialogues with her reflection in the mirror testify, she has a love/hate relationship with her figure and face. She tries to heed her aunt’s cautionary advice: Do not get caught up in getting married, and instead find a friend to love. In these chapters, Sybylla meets three very different men. In each case, her reaction reveals an attitude typical of young love—with Everard, selfishness; with Frank, arrogance; and with Harry, happiness.
Everard Grey resembles a character in a Jane Austen novel. He is an educated city attorney, out of place in the rural world of ‘Possum Gully. His dandy preference to wear gloves underscores his outsider status. He speaks in the elegant overwrought rhetoric typical of the Prince Charming-templates of British romances. A parttime poet and amateur sketcher, he is a “dabbler” (28) in the arts. He is—and the word has weight in Jane Austen novels—smitten with young Sybylla. In a rural world that has little interest in the arts, Everard is taken by Sybylla’s singing voice. He sees for Sybylla a future in the arts—which appeals to Sybylla as she sorts through what a future in ‘Possum Gully would entail for someone with creative aspirations. His promises to cultivate Sybylla’s talent by finding her a singing coach and the best talent agencies are remarkable in that they are apparently sincere. His intentions for Sybylla are motivated by admiration for her talent, telling her, “Do you know that you have one of the most wonderful natural voices I have heard?” (28). Sybylla rejects his proposal as preposterous, but she relishes the flattery. From Everard, Sybylla confirms what she has suspected: that she has talent, which makes her different. From this point, she is not ready to surrender her independence to a man.
The proposal from Frank reveals the callous side to Sybylla that, presumably, even her grown-up self who is narrating the novel finds off-putting. Everything about Frank Hawden’s proposal is appropriate and serious. As the scion of a vast farm back in England, he has great expectations. He finds young Sybylla fetching and comely. He lays out his proposal with business-like efficiency. It does not even occur to Sybylla to take seriously the proposal of a man who works with cows and pigs. For a girl who scorns her own reflection, what Frank brings out is her petulant arrogance—all part of growing up. Sybylla even makes Frank the victim of a prank when she impulsively decides to make a run to Dogtrap alone.
With Harry, Sybylla experiences symptoms of giddiness typical of a romance novel. For the first time, Sybylla, terminally depressed, confesses to being happy. The world of New South Wales, the same desolate emotional and cultural wasteland of before, is now suddenly blooming with energy and radiant with joy. What most fascinates Sybylla is Harry’s quiet. That quiet did not indicate he was “wooden,” “brainless,” or a “morose dreamer” (39), but rather that he was deep, thoughtful, and most of all mysterious.
The rowboat scene and later the carriage ride back to Caddagat are right out of romantic comedies. Two apparently mismatched people—one, stubborn and independent, the other, confident and cool—play games of teasing and flirting while discovering an intimate connection manifested in long and looping walks. With Harry, Sybylla believes she may have found the friendship love her aunt described. Harry does not push love by rushing into proposing. He respects her space and stays just elusive enough for her to find him irresistible. The novel cautions readers against drawing the same conclusions that smitten Sybylla makes: After all, when they first meet, before he knows who she is, Harry reveals the predatory urges. He sidles up to Sybylla plucking lemons, leers at her figure even though she is only 16, and, because he is wealthy and she is a servant, demands a kiss. It foreshadows his boorish behavior later.
