My Brilliant Career

“He was my hero, confidant, encyclopedia, mate, and even my religion till I was ten.”

Crucial to Sybylla’s development is her relationship with her father. His downfall into debt and alcoholism is her earliest experience with disappointment. Unfortunately, it will not be the first.

“He was crippled with too many Utopian ideas of honesty, and he was too soft to come off as anything but second-best in a deal.”

Sybylla struggles to understand what appears to be illogical. Everything that makes her father admirable leads to his financial ruin. At this point, she cannot grasp how a good man could lose so much, so quickly. Yet writing from the vantage point of maturity, Sybylla acknowledges that his demeanor was simply incompatible with the harsh landscape of rural New South Wales.

“Towards my mother I felt differently. A woman is but the helpless tool of man—a creature of circumstances.”

Central to Sybylla’s evolution into adulthood is her struggle to understand her culture’s double standard. She judges her father as a failure because of his poor decisions and alcoholism. But she withholds judgment about her mother because, according to her culture, women are helpless and should be pitied.

“This was life—my life—my career, my brilliant career. I was fifteen—fifteen...Life is a curse.”

Sybylla’s despair reveals irony. Like many teenagers, she is overly dramatic about a commonplace situation—she is just helping her father with the calves. With so few experiences behind her, one might argue that she has not yet earned the right to such existential gloom.

“I don’t believe there is a God…and if there is He is not the merciful being depicted, or He wouldn’t always be torturing me for his own amusement.”

Sybylla thinks of herself like the suffering Job. Sybylla testifies to her atheism and her rejection of the loving God she hears about in church. She cannot square a benevolent Creator with her life of misfortune.

“I was discontented and restless, and longed unendurably to be out of the stream of life.”

Sybylla expresses sentiments that suggest her unhappiness could lead to self-harm. The frame of the novel—an adult Sybylla voicing her adolescent thoughts—indicates that Sybylla’s anguish, though real to her, will be later looked back on with a new, more mature perspective.

“You will find that plain looks will not prevent you from gaining the friendship love of your fellows—the only real love there is.”

This is a backhanded compliment. Aunt Helen tells Sybylla that because she is not “cursed” with traditional beauty, she will not be distracted by fawning and insincere suitors. Sybylla’s lack of stunning looks, according to Aunt Helen, is your her chance to find real love through friendship.

“I put the hope that one day I would clasp hands with them, and know the unspeakable comfort and heart-rest of congenial companionship.”

Sybylla talks about the emotional bonds she forms not with friends or family but with writers such as Longfellow, Dickens, and Thackeray. This is the company she dreams of joining.

“I beheld a young girl with eyes and skin of the clearest and brightest, and lips of brilliant scarlet, and a chest and a pair of arms which would pass muster with the best.”

Sybylla struggles with her self-image. She swings from extremes of self-loathing over her plainness to moments, as here, when she is captivated by her own looks.

“Career! That is all girls think of now, instead of being good wives and mothers and attending to their homes.”

Although Sybylla seeks out the emotional support of her grandmother, here the woman reveals that for all her sympathies for Sybylla, she is rooted in her culture’s perceptions of the role for women. Sybylla broaches the subject of a career on stage. Her grandmother rejects the argument because of her old-fashioned values, and not based on Sybylla’s talents.

“I have two sentiments regarding [love], and in either you disgust me.”

Sybylla dismissing Frank’s marriage proposal because they barely know each other, and he presumes when he comes into his inheritance she will be happy. She reveals her honesty, but there is no tenderness. Sybylla is needlessly brutal and even contemptuous of Frank’s possibilities as a suitor.

“You drive a nail? You’re only a girl. Girls are the helplessest, uselesest, troublesomest little creatures in the world.”

Although Harry comes off as the ideal suitor, he is a product of his culture. Here, he contemptuously and sincerely dismisses any efforts of a woman. He indicates for the first time the sort of life Sybylla, such a free spirit, would have to endure.

“Ah, health and wealth, happiness and youth, joy and light, life and love! What a warmhearted place is the world.”

Echoing the sentiments typical of the romances of the British tradition, Sybylla, discovering the love she feels for Harry, succumbs to happiness. She no longer sees herself as a Job and no longer yearns for death. But she is extreme here, and this is not the novel’s happy ending.

“He never once uttered a word of love to me—not so much as one of the soft nothings in which young people of opposite sexes often deal without any particular significance.”

Recalling Helen’s philosophical words about friendship love, Sybylla records how she and Harry simply enjoy each other’s company. Harry, ever the gentleman, does not push for any physical expressions of love, nor does he push the idea of love itself.

“Because I have been cursed with the power of seeing, thinking, and worse than all, feeling, and branded with the stinging affliction of ugliness.”

Here, Sybylla articulates her first inclinations to become a writer. In her confession to Aunt Helen, Sybylla defines her sensitivity to others, her deep emotions, and her powers of observation and analysis as a curse. She believes these qualities are a consolation prize for her ugliness and plainness.

“He was irritatingly cool and matter-of-fact…I had come to the conclusion that he was barren of emotion or passion of any kind.”

Sybylla is determined to assert a dominant role in Harry’s emotional life. At her 17th birthday celebration, Sybylla wants to get Harry to show some reckless and spontaneous emotion, and she goads him by flirting with other men at the dinner. It is a risky ploy and a measure of Sybylla’s immaturity.

“I could feel the heat of his body, and his big heart beating wildly.”

This is a moment of intense feelings of anger, not love. Sybylla’s flirtation at her birthday party gets this unexpectedly volatile reaction from the otherwise cool and collected Harry. She feels not his passion but his threat, an indication again of Harry’s temper and what might be Sybylla’s future.

“You imagined that you were of sufficient importance to assist a man through life? . . The world is made for men.”

Harry, for all his charms, is predisposed to think in the gender stereotypes of his era. If he is trying to reassure Sybylla that her rejection will not destroy him, he does so in a way that demeans Sybylla as a person.

“I loved Harold as much as I could love anyone…but, but, but, I did not want to marry him.”

Sybylla loves Harry so much, she will not be with him because she is certain they are wrong for each other. The repeated “but” reveals how Sybylla tries to convince herself to leave the man she loves.

“How I envied their ignorant contentment! They were ducks on a pond, but I was a duck forced to live in a desert.”

Sybylla hates the time she spends with the M’Swats, their poverty, their squalor, and their ignorance. In her immaturity and her condescending patronizing manner, she never sees the family’s virtues.

“Sure, tell you father he needn’t worry over the money. I’ll never be hard on him.”

In this compassionate remark, the novel—if not Sybylla—redeems the M’Swat family. Despite how deeply Sybylla loathes the family, they show her and her bankrupt father compassion and support. Without fanfare, they excuse the father’s considerable debts.

“I regret your decision, but trust I have sufficient manhood to prevent me from thrusting myself upon any lady, much less you.”

In accepting Sybylla’s decision not to marry him, Harry is both gallant and petty. Although he accepts her decision and will miss you, he would never stoop to begging a woman for her attentions, much less a woman like her. This suggests Harry’s deep-seated misogyny.

“Go marry the sort of woman you ought to marry. The sort that all men like. A good conventional woman.”

Sybylla turns down Harry’s proposal. She tells him to marry a woman better suited to his personality, ostensibly indicating her willingness to blame herself for the relationship’s failure. But the closing line reveals Sybylla’s subtle argument that she would simply be too much of a woman for such a conventional man.