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.
Character Analysis
Sybylla Melvyn
Sybylla Melyvn is a familiar character in the literature, films, and television shows about adolescence: She is hyper-sensitive yet honest to the point of rudeness. She is also rebellious, unhappy with anything but unlimited horizons, and uneasy with any attempts to control or contain her fiercely independent spirit. Certain that she is special and destined for an extraordinary life, Sybylla is nevertheless profoundly discontented with who she is and how others see her.
Sybylla is a character easy to dislike—and Franklin understands that. The character reveals an insufferable ego, much like any adolescent: “I am afflicted with the power of thought, which is a heavy curse” (77). This is the story of the maturation of an artist and writer. What defines Sybylla’s character and puts her egotism into relief is the novel’s frame. The story is told by Sybylla looking back on her tempestuous and emotional adolescence and trying to stay honest to that naïve and adolescent tone in the writing.
Thus, Sybylla can seem dramatic as she moves emotionally toward the novel’s closing epiphany. She is determined she will find in writing the contentment and emotional depth she does not find in her life. For a sensitive adolescent girl at the turn of the last century, there would be no greater fear than settling for the domesticity of marriage and children. Sybylla is smart, well-read, and gifted in the arts; she yearns to be defined by those gifts. She wants a brilliant career where the “brilliant” is not ironic. A teenager, she longs for a future in which she can be free to be who she is. Her name derives from the sybils, prophetic figures in Greek legend able to see into the future.
Harry Beechum
Harry Beechum is everything Sybylla’s society tells her she should want and, consequently, the last thing such a free spirit needs.
In a conventional romance, Harry would embody the perfect suitor. He is handsome, athletically strong, wealthy, coolly confident, able to shoe a horse with the same finesse as he plays a piano, and a man easily given to play and having fun. In a world of nattering fools, Harry is conspicuously taciturn, preferring to speak only when he has something to say. He is an old-school gentleman: When he loses most of his fortune, he gallantly excuses Sybylla from their engagement and promises he will return only when he has recovered financial stability. And when Sybylla tells him, by mail no less, that she cannot pursue their engagement, he steps back without second-guessing Sybylla’s decision. Instead, he heads off to America to sort through the devastation to his heart. Yes, he has a temper, but he keeps it largely in check until Sybylla capriciously sets out to provoke him at her birthday dinner; and yes, he is jealous of the attention other eligible bachelors pay to Sybylla, but that signals the authenticity of her love and his unwillingness to play games with the heart. He is earnest in his declaration of love.
For these reasons, as Sybylla’s grandmother and mother tirelessly tell her, Harry would be perfect for her. That he believes he can lay claim to her is his unforgiveable flaw. Even Sybylla understands when she turns him down the final time that she has given up her last, best chance to get out of Possum Gully. Because he is the “perfect” suitor, yes, he is also a clear and present danger to a young woman who aspires to be an artist, embraces loneliness as a given, and sees in any authentic emotional displays a sign of weakness.
Dick Melvyn
If My Brilliant Career has a tragic figure, it would be Sybylla’s luckless father Dick Melvyn. After the publication of the novel, Franklin faced enormous criticism not because of her portrait of a free-spirited, rebellious Australian teenaged girl but for her stark and honest depiction of the dark and depressing life of Australia’s farming culture embodied most ingloriously by Dick Melvyn.
Nothing better suggests Dick Melvyn’s character than the opening scene in the book. A loving father, Dick takes his oldest daughter with him to drop salt. Sybylla is only three. She is surprised when she sees a black snake curled up in the deep fern along the river. Her father nobly interferes to save his panicking daughter, but in his clumsy efforts to pull her away to safety, he burns her fingers with his ever-present pipe. Every noble thing Dick does leads to unintended disaster.
With no qualifications save his noble ambition to provide for his family, Dick gambles the family’s little money to make a go of sheep farming. He is Sybylla’s hero when she is a young, happy-go-lucky dreamer—but his incompetence and naïve trust in others leads to his spiral into alcoholism and bankruptcy. He is a victim of his poor judgment and unforeseeable bad luck, most notably the brutal two year-long drought. Unlike Harry, who rebounds from financial collapse, Dick falls but never gets back up. Driven to stay afloat through resorting to the equivalent of loan sharks, Dick quickly finds comfort only in self-medicating with alcohol. He becomes a laughingstock in town and an embarrassment to his children. As Sybylla admits when she returns from Five-Bob, her father is a “broken-down man” with a “miserable appearance and demeanor” (92) whom she barely recognizes, destroyed by his own virtues.
Lucy Bossier
Sybylla’s grandmother offers her granddaughter ample emotional support. She is Sybylla’s go-to comforter when things go wrong— as, for instance, when she first arrives at the M’Swat farm. In this, Lucy Bossier is different from her daughter, Sybylla’s mother, who dismisses out of hand Sybylla’s quirky behavior, tomboyish ways, and sharp tongue. Her mother says such things will make more difficult the goal of any young Australian girl: marriage. From the moment Sybylla arrives at her grandmother’s spacious home, despite feeling shame for her family and its financial straits, she feels welcome: “How did my grandmother receive me? Dear old soul, I had nothing to fear” (21). Lucy is loving in ways that Sybylla’s mother is not.
But the reality reveals itself to Sybylla. Yes, her grandmother is sympathetic to Sybylla’s restless spirit, her naïve dreams of being an artist, and even her quirky ways with the several men who seek her hand. She is endlessly patient with her granddaughter’s diva-esque sense of her life’s hardships. And she provides her granddaughter with a sanctuary apart from the backwater world of Possum Gully.
But ultimately the grandmother reveals she is very much of her own conservative time and place. She says Sybylla has the talent for the stage, but that is not what good girls do, she adds. Girls offer themselves in marriage and are content with taking their place next to a husband to raise a brood of children. In this, Sybylla’s grandmother will not brook her rebellion. She will counsel only the wisdom of marriage and family, despite the evidence of her own dysfunctional family (Sybylla’s mother is locked into a loveless marriage; her daughter Helen was abandoned by her loving husband for a younger woman). That does not make Lucy Bossier a hypocrite; it makes her a product of her culture.
