My Brilliant Career

The stream of the unhoused that Sybylla watches is a sobering moment. Like the American Realists at the close of the 19th century—Hamlin Garland, Stephen Crane, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain—who rendered gripping depictions of life in poverty-stricken America, Miles Franklin gives witness to life in the hard-scrapple Outback of New South Wales.

In this, Franklin also allies herself with a pair of British realists Sybylla acknowledges are her favorites: Dickens and Thackeray (25). The reality of poverty is made vivid by Franklin/Sybylla’s detailing. So keen and accurate is her depiction of the depressing hopelessness of Australian farm life that Franklin pulled the book from shelves and arranged to have it re-released only after her death. Poverty, however, compels the storyline. The tragedy of Dick Melvyn is his restless pursuit of riches. His spiral into debt and eventually bankruptcy costs him the admiration of his children and the respect of his community. This desire to shake free of “the shackles of destitution” (25) dooms Sybylla to her time at the M’Swats.

The shocking reality of poverty registers with Sybylla when she arrives at the M’Swat farm. The interior of the tiny tin-roofed home is filthy from the dirt carried in by the 11 members of the family: “The smudge was only one of the many varieties of dirt on the horrible foul-smelling tablecloth. Dirt was on the floor, the door, the chairs, the children’s heads, and the cups from which they drank” (78). What bothers Sybylla most, however, is the thought that for all their obvious poverty—the unkept house, the rude and filthy kids, and the stunning ignorance of the parents—the M’Swats were better off than her family. After all, it was the M’Swats’ loan to her broke father than indebted her family to the M’Swats.

Harry’s sudden spiral into bankruptcy, which, like Dick’s, stems from events he cannot control, upends his engagement with Sybylla. Without money, he feels unworthy of her love and promises to make good on his marriage proposal only after he has rebooted his wealth. That it comes not from any hard work but from an inheritance from a woman he does not even know is ironic, but that irony is lost on Harry who sees that his wealth restores his good name.

Sybylla has two talents: singing and writing. In these two expressions of her soul, she testifies to the power of art to console and to give existence itself, which can be mean and depressing, a catapulting sense of beauty and grace.

Sybylla’s exquisite singing voice causes Everard Grey to fall under her spell. Singing, however, is more than a joy for Sybylla. It is her escape into a world where she is happy, calm, and entirely self-sustaining: “To get away to myself, when I was sure no one else could bear me, and sing and sing till I made the echoes ring, was one of the chief joys of my existence” (28). She considers a career in singing. Everard, as part of his proposal package, promises to use his connections in the city to secure her a singing coach and every opportunity to become a star. Later, Sybylla, as she languishes at the M’Swat farm, pages through a trashy tabloid-style magazine that profiles newly discovered singers who have found glamour and celebrity in Sydney. Their success seems remote from where she lives. For her, the power of art comes not from its ability to succeed in the marketplace but from the beauty it gives to a world that, for Sybylla, is full of disappointment, agony, and irony.

When she tells Harry that she is turning down his proposal so that she can find out whether she can write, she is uncertain if she can succeed. She asks herself, “Why do I write? For what does anyone write” (104). The book in the reader’s hands is presumably the book she writes, which testifies to her ability to discover the revelations awaiting in what otherwise appears to be routine existence: “I have voiced the things around me” (104). This is the power of art.

That power is self-generating, self-sustaining, and most importantly for Sybylla self-justifying. The power of art is necessarily isolating; whatever the artist’s skills and whatever spell they cast, they are ultimately alone. The girl she criticizes so harshly in the mirror is the same girl able to enchant a drawing room full of people with her voice and later to capture the restless energy, careless beauty, and harsh realities of the Australian bush world in her writing. But art is her private enchantment. As she warns in the book’s Special Notice, “A poet must be companionless—alone, fearfully alone.”