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 24-30Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 24 Summary: “‘Thou Knowest Not What a Day May Bring Forth’”
Weeks pass in a blur when Harry shows up at Caddagat. Sybylla notices he looks different, with his face drawn. He confesses to her that after a series of unexpected business failures, including ill-advised investments and a bank failure, that he has lost the title to Five-Bob. His assets are drained. By his own admission, he is a “pauper” (70). Nobly he frees Sybylla from her obligation to marry him. Overwhelmed, however, Sybylla promises to marry him as soon as she turns 21. “I would marry you,” she tells Harry, “if you were poor as a cow” (70). Harry departs. “Men,” Sybylla decides, “are very weak and simple” How then, she asks, is the “world made for men?” (70).
Chapter 25 Summary: “Because?”
Within weeks, Harry returns and tells Sybylla he is off to Sydney to recoup his fortune. He promises he will return before she turns 21. Sybylla promises to stay true, and as he departs, she cries uncontrollably. She recalls, “I loved Harry as much as I could ever love anyone” (72).
Chapter 26 Summary: “Boast Not Thyself of Tomorrow”
Into the new year, Sybylla misses Harry but finds contentment in her routine: “I forgot all my wild unattainable ambitions in the little pleasures of everyday life” (73). A letter arrives from Sybylla’s mother. Her father is deeply in debt to a dirt farmer named Peter M’Swat. Dick has no means to pay him back, and, desperate, he promises Sybylla to the M’Swat farm in Barney’s Gap to serve as governess-servant to their nine children for a year. Sybylla is outraged, but her mother says the family needs her to help. Two weeks later, Sybylla is on a carriage heading to the remote town of Barney’s Gap: “My pleasant life […] was going into the past, fading as the hills which surrounded it were melting into a hazy line of blue” (76).
Chapter 27 Summary: “My Journey”
The M’Swat farm is as bad as Sybylla feared. It is a tiny rundown farmhouse with just two rooms and a tin roof that magnifies the summer heat. Because there is no fencing, chickens and pigs run everywhere, including in the house.
Chapter 28 Summary: “To Life”
Sybylla quickly decides that the children are unkempt and unruly and the mother lazy. The house smells of animal waste and onions. There are no books—only cheap glossy popular magazines. The only redeeming object is a piano. After dinner the first night, the family begs Sybylla to play their “pianey,” but Sybylla finds too many keys broken. It is useless. That night, she cries herself to sleep.
Chapter 29 Summary: “To Life (Continued)”
The next morning, Sybylla writes a letter to her grandmother—not her mother—begging her to get her back to Caddagat. She waits weeks for an answer, but it comes from her mother who tells her to grow up and stop thinking about herself.
Chapter 30 Summary: “Where Ignorance Is Bliss, ‘Tis Folly to Be Wise”
Days crawl by. Desperate, bored, and sinking into “dead monotony” (88), Sybylla reads anything she can find. She even reads the farming diary the father keeps, a dismal record of daily feeding of the animals and the weather. Paging through one of the magazines one day, she comes across a profile of promising new singers in Sydney. She thinks that should be her, with the glamor and the money. Watching the children is difficult. They seldom mind her, not even during the lessons. But she envies their “ignorant contentment,” comparing herself to a “duck being forced to live in a desert” (88).
Chapters 24-30 Analysis
In these chapters, with the abrupt departure of Harry and the distraction of his marriage proposal, Sybylla’s character comes into focus. As the experience at the M’Swat farm reveals, Sybylla is still growing emotionally and still making overly dramatic assertions, still jumping to conclusions. She is not yet ready to be Dickens, the writer she dreams of being. Too harsh, judgmental, and intolerant, Sybylla reveals an unsettling tendency to dismiss others and to view them through her narrow window of experience. This is ironic, given that just months earlier she sympathized with the stream of homeless people. These chapters move the narrative toward Sybylla’s emotional collapse at the M’Swat farm. She lapses into grand despondency because she entirely misreads the family, their dynamic, and her place within it. She does see the M’Swats for what they are: a too-big family struggling to make ends meet in a world indifferent to them. She claims she wants to be an artist in the tradition of Dickens and Thackeray, realist writers who found in the modest stuff of working-class life all around them a justification for sympathy, not judgment. But Sybylla’s attitude proves she is still not ready to be the writer she dreams of becoming.
The family is under-educated, but they are in a constant struggle against a forbidding land desiccated by a year-long drought. The family lacks cultural finesse and their piano suffers from neglect, but they have little time for the arts, content with glossy tabloid magazines that transport them out of their daily grind. The children are unruly and prone to sassing Sybylla as their governess, but there are nine of them and a mother who is overworked, overtired, and emotionally exhausted. And although their Bible is unread and coated with dust, the M’Swats exhibit simple commitment to each other within a rough-edged but loving Christian.
As she agonizes over what she perceives to be her cruel exile, Sybylla never sees what Dickens and Thackeray saw: the possibility of literature centered on these people and their world. Without that empathy, Sybylla sags into despondency verging on an emotional breakdown.
