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 31-38Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 31 Summary: “Mr. M’Swat and I Have a Bust-Up”
When she feels most claustrophobic in the M’Swats’ hovel, Sybylla goes for walks in the evening to think. The father assumes with a leer she is meeting a lover, presumably his oldest son, who is 21. Sybylla contemptuously dismisses the idea: “Though he were a millionaire, I would think his touch contamination” (89). She apologizes—not for the sentiment but for expressing it aloud. She struggles with her unhappiness, telling herself the M’Swats are nice enough people. Nevertheless, their farm “was warping [her] very soul” (91).
Chapter 32 Summary: “Ta-Ta to Barney’s Gap”
By the end of summer, Sybylla’s spirits are drooping to the point the M’Swats release her from her obligation and forgives her father’s debt. In September, Sybylla gratefully heads home.
Chapter 33 Summary: “Back at ‘Possum Gully”
When Sybylla comes home, she is stunned by her father’s condition. Drinking too much, stoop-shouldered, and silent, he is a broken man and an embarrassment to the family. Her siblings are eager to leave the farm for the city—any city. Sybylla learns that her younger sister Gertie had been sent off to help the Beechums as they struggle without Harry. Feeling like the Biblical Job, she curses God and waits only to die.
Chapter 34 Summary: “But Absent Friends Are Soon Forgot”
A letter arrives from Harry. A friend of his father’s, a former lover, died and left Harry a considerable fortune. He has returned to Five-Bob and purchased the farm. Sybylla’s first response is relief: “He was rich […] my obligation to him had ceased” (94). A second letter arrives, however, and Harry says he is on his way to “take possession of her” (95). Taken back by his tone of ownership, Sybylla immediately writes back and assures him he has no obligation to her. In an oddly formal letter, he accepts her decision. “So much,” Sybylla thinks, “for my romance of love. It had ended in a bottle of smoke” (96). She knew that Harry could now turn his attentions to the much prettier and more lovable Gertie.
Chapter 35 Summary: “The 3rd of December 1898”
Weeks pass. Harry appears at Caddagat unannounced to broker a deal for some sheep. Sybylla keeps her distance. She knows he is there to ask her parents to marry Gertie. Sybylla tells herself she will not say or do anything about the matter, as Gertie was “so pretty, so girlish, so understandable, so full of innocent coquetry” (100). Harry spends the night.
Chapter 36 Summary: “Once Upon a Time, When the Days Were long and Hot”
The next morning, Sunday, Sybylla suggests that they walk to church, despite the heat. During the walk, Harry broaches marriage—to Sybylla, not Gertie. Taken aback, Sybylla refuses. She tells him, “Leave me, go and marry the sort of woman you ought to marry” (101). When he presses her, she tells him she wants only to be a writer, and that she longs to give voice to the things she knows: “small-minded thoughts, the sodden round of grinding tasks” (101). Harry begs, “Can’t you love me just a little?” (101), he begs.
Suddenly, Sybylla sees him as weak, and she is sure his fancy for her will pass. She accepts that Harry was her best chance to get out of the narrow life of Caddagat and that her life now will be one of “ghastly aloneness” (103).
Chapter 37 Summary: “He That Despiseth Little Things, Shall Fall Little by Little”
Sybylla hears by letter a few weeks later that Harry has left for America. Sybylla fights off depression. She is 19 and will commit herself to her writing.
Chapter 38 Summary: “A Tale That Is Told and a Day That Is Done”
Going into the new year, Sybylla’s heart is “weary” (105), and she is unsure of her future. She closes with a happy salute to Australia and her declaration of how proud she is to be Australian: “I am proud I am an Australian, a daughter of the Southern Cross, a child of the mighty bush” (106). She has had enough of pessimism and wishes good fortune to all her fellow Australians, who are “cheerful; honest, and brave” (106).
Chapters 31-38 Analysis
The novel reaches its unexpectedly happy ending—but not the traditional happy ending associated with romance novels. There is no wedding, grand kiss, or happily-ever-after. In moving toward Sybylla’s closing embrace of her career as a writer, Sybylla must do two things: One, she must evolve out of her childish and petty scorn for her family, town, country, and culture; and two, she must see Harry for what he is: weak, emotionally needy, and more of a threat than an answer to her discontent. The two are connected. In setting herself free of the marriage to Harry and the inevitable life of quiet desperation and emotional terrorism he promises, Sybylla opens up, in the glorious closing paragraphs, to the wonder, energy, and subtle magic of her country and its people. She is poised at last to begin without irony her brilliant career. She is no longer a wanna-be Job—she is ready now to be an Australian Dickens.
When Sybylla departs the M’Swat farm, she does not realize that, if not for the kindness and compassion of a family she dismisses as crude and ignorant, she would not be returning to the world she knows. M’Swat releases Sybylla months early and promises not to go after her father for the debt he owes. It is a magnanimous gesture all but lost on Sybylla who only wants to leave behind the dismal farm. She never sees the family for what it is—she is too busy being Job to be Dickens. She judges them based on the tabloid magazines they read, the condition of their house, and their lack of refinement, rather than on their character.
When Harry returns as the unexpected beneficiary of a huge inheritance (a device common in romances), the novel prepares for what seems like the traditional happy ending: His fortunes restored, Harry can claim his eager young bride and begin their life flush with bliss and prosperity. That is what Harry expects when he writes he is on his way to take possession of Sybylla.
His assumption that Sybylla is now his by virtue of his unexpected fortune exposes to Sybylla the dimension of Harry’s emotional threat. Despite his intimidating physical presence and cool confidence, he is a dependent figure, weak and committed to having around him those who can bolster his sense of importance. Go find the kind of woman who will relish that role, Sybylla tells him, because it is not her. Because of Harry’s presumption that he is right and that Sybylla is his to claim, the breakup is messy, and in the end Harry proves the depth of his emotional neediness: When Sybylla sends him on his way, he collapses into despair and exiles himself to distant America to sort through his options, mistaking movement through space as a measure of emotional depth.
Finally divested of the fawning and needful Harry, Sybylla is ready to begin her brilliant career. But first she makes her declaration of dependence on the very people and culture she had disdained: “I am proud to be an Australian, a daughter of the Southern Cross, a child of the mighty bush…sons and daughters of toil, would that I would be worthy to be one of you” (106). She has abandoned her elitism, her Job-like sense of her own suffering, and her narcissistic need for validation. Empowered yet humbled, Sybylla is ready now to be the writer she dreams to be.
