Miles Franklin

Alternately hilarious and heartwarming, this beloved coming-of-age novel from the Australian outback brings together unforgettable characters with clarity and truth, all told in a unique young woman's voice. My Brilliant Career was made into an award-winning film starring Judy Davis and Sam Neill. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

My Brilliant Career

Some Everyday Folk and Dawn

My brilliant career

This captivating Australian novel transcends time and genre in the classic tale of an extraordinarily ambitious young woman who passionately evades marriage to pursue her envisioned brilliant career

Purporting to be the Autobiography of Sybylla Penelope Melvyn

My Career Goes Bung

First published in 1901, this Australian classic recounts the live of 16-year-old Sybylla Melvyn. Trapped on her parents' outback farm, she simultaneously loves bush life and hates the physical burdens it imposes. For Sybylla longs for a more refined, aesthetic lifestyle -- to read, to think, to sing -- but most of all to do great things. Suddenly her life is transformed. Whisked away to live on her grandmother's gracious property, she falls under the eye of the rich and handsome Harry Beecham. And soon she finds herself choosing between everything a conventional life offers and her own plans for a 'brilliant career'.

Mi impresionante carrera

This is the gripping saga of how Danny Delacey, the 18-year-old Protestant son of a university teacher, convinces his Catholic girlfriend, Johanna Cooley, the 19-year-old daughter of wealthy farmers, to run away with him to Australia and how they and their lineage succeed in colonising the southern highlands of New South Wales. It is a story that does not obscure the hardships that mirrored Australia at the time, the harsh living conditions and the dangers they faced. Danny is respectful of Aboriginal people and the ideas of others, Johanna is torn between passionate love for her husband and Catholic guilt for abandoning her Irish family...

All That Swagger

My Brilliant Career / My Career Goes Bung

All that Swagger

Brent of Bin Bin

Back to Bool Bool

A Ramiparous Novel with Several Prominent Characters and a Hantle of Others Disposed as the Atolls of Oceania's Archipelagoes

Back to Bod Bod

Bring the Monkey is a spoof of the English country-house mystery. The novel includes a host of characters, not to mention a monkey called Percy. Unexpectedly the room is suddenly plunged into darkness a bracelet goes missing and finally a dead body is found. Bring the Monkey is a quirky novel that digs at social conventions, class and snobbery. Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin was an Australian writer and feminist who is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career. She was committed to the development of a uniquely Australian form of literature, and she actively pursued this goal by supporting writers, literary journals, and writers' organisations.

Bring the Monkey

Henry Handel Richardson

Presenting My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin and The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson with illustrations by Nicholas Tamblyn and Katherine Eglund. These Australian coming of age classics are part of The Great Books Series by Golding Books. My Brilliant Career is one of the most celebrated Australian novels, a unique coming of age classic with a memorable and strong female lead in Sybylla Melvyn, an aspiring artist and an individual who is in many ways ahead of her time. Miles Franklin's first novel, written while she was still a teenager, also influenced Australian history (and Australian literature) in many ways that the author could not have predicted, being a key launching pad for her long career and its culmination in the prestigious Miles Franklin Award, and just as significant a launching pad for film luminaries (involved in making the film of the novel in 1979) such as director Gilliam Armstrong and actors Judy Davis and Sam Neill. Just as important in Australian feminist literature, and Australian fiction in general, is The Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson. It presents another strong female character in Laura Tweedle Rambotham, an imaginative storyteller that undergoes great challenges at a Melbourne boarding school (based on Richardson's own experiences). As with My Brilliant Career, a film of the novel (made in 1978) was significant in the Australian film industry (and beyond), being directed by Bruce Beresford and starring Susannah Fowle, John Waters, and Barry Humphries (of Dame Edna Everage fame). Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, known as Miles Franklin, was born in 1879 in Talbingo, New South Wales. She is best known for her novel My Brilliant Career, published in 1901 with the help of writer Henry Lawson. Though she wrote throughout her life, her other popular novel, All That Swagger, was not published until 1936. In 1906, Franklin moved to Chicago and undertook secretarial work for Australian Alice Henry at the National Women's Trade Union League, and also co-edited the league's magazine, Life and Labor. After volunteering as a hospital cook attached to the Serbian army near Lake Ostrovo later in World War I, from 1919 to 1926 she worked as Secretary with the National Housing and Town Planning Association in London. After the death of her father in 1931, Franklin resettled in Australia. She resolutely encouraged writers and the growth of Australian literature, and her endowment of the annual Miles Franklin Award rewards works about "Australian Life in any of its phases." Franklin died at the age of 74. Ethel Florence Lindesay Richardson, known by her pen name of Henry Handel Richardson, was born in East Melbourne, Victoria, in 1870. Her family lived in various Victorian towns, including Chiltern, Queenscliff, Koroit, and Maldon; her mother was postmistress at Maldon (her father having died of syphilis when she was nine). Richardson went to board at the Presbyterian Ladies' College in Melbourne from ages 13 to 17, excelling there in the arts and music, and some of these experiences were the basis for The Getting of Wisdom (1910). In 1888, her mother took the family to Europe to enable Richardson to continue her musical studies at the Leipzig Conservatorium. While in Leipzig--where her first novel, Maurice Guest (1908), is set--she met the Scot John George Robertson (a student and later teacher of German literature). In 1894 they married in Munich; his subsequent posting at University College would take them to London. Richardson returned to Australia in 1912 to research family history for her trilogy The Fortunes of Richard Mahony (comprising novels Australia Felix (1917), The Way Home (1925), and Ultima Thule (1929)--the latter awarded the Australian Literature Society Gold Medal for 1929), but this would be her last return home. Richardson died in Hastings, England, in 1946.

My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin and the Getting of Wisdom by Henry Handel Richardson with Illustrations by Nicholas Tamblyn and Katherine Eglund (Illustrated)

Written by a teenager living in the Australian bush in the 1890s and originally published in 1901, Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career is a candid representation of the aspirations and frustrations of a young woman constrained by middle-class social arrangements, especially the pressure to marry. My Brilliant Career has continued to delight readers and to cause them to locate their personal realities in the struggle of Franklin’s heroine, Sybylla Melvyn, to recognize and to pursue what she most wants and needs in her life. In addition to the rich selection of appendices, this edition includes maps of early twentieth-century Australia and a critical introduction that outlines political and economic developments relevant to the novel, traces the literary landscape upon which My Brilliant Career first appeared, and describes the reception and interpretation given the novel in the century after its initial publication (including the celebrated 1979 film adaptation).

A Novel in the First Person and Parentheses

Prelude to Waking

Passionate, headstrong and imaginative, Sybylla Melvyn is one of the most endearing heroines of Australian literature. 'I am given to something which a man never pardons in a woman. You will draw away as though I were a snake when you hear.' With this warning, Sybylla confesses to her rich and handsome suitor that she is given to writing stories and bound, therefore on a brilliant career. In this ironically titled and riotous first novel by Miles Franklin, originally published in 1901, Sybylla tells the story of growing up passionate and rebellious in rural NSW, where the most that girls could hope for was to marry or to teach. Sybylla will do neither, but that doesn't stop her from falling in love, and it doesn't make the choices any easier. Included in this edition is the sequel, My Career Goes Bung, which sees Sybylla amongst the literati in Sydney.

Miles Franklin

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