Abstract
Based on the theory of American feminist critic Elaine Showalter，this paper analyzes a peculiar feature of early Australian novel My Brilliant Career and discovers that it spans three phases of Women’s Literature. Through her indefatigable strive for equality between men and women, independent personality and self-fulfillment, the bush girl Sybylla in the novel had set a brilliant example for today’s women.
Highlights
Reading Australian early novel My Brilliant Career, I was deeply impressed by the fragrance of the bush landscape penetrating through the whole novel as well as amazed by the extraordinary literary gift of the sixteen-year–old young girl who finished the great work within a few weeks
Miles Franklin has had a long-lasting impact on Australian literary life through her endowment of a Australia’s most prestigious literary award known as the Miles Franklin Award, which is an annual literary prize to encourage and support writers of Australian literature and is awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases".The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin, who is best known for writing My Brilliant Career and for bequeathing her estate to fund this prestigious award
Mr Melvyn was “my hero, confidant, encyclopedia, and mate... a fine fellow in those days, a kind and indulgent parent, a chivalrous husband, a capital host, a man full of ambition and gentleness.” (Franklin, 1981:2)At that time, Mr Melvyn was perfect in her daughter’s eyes and Sybylla’s short but happy childhood came to an end when they moved to Possum Gully where Melvyn indulged in drinking and gambling which soon left him on the verge of bankruptcy
Summary
Reading Australian early novel My Brilliant Career, I was deeply impressed by the fragrance of the bush landscape penetrating through the whole novel as well as amazed by the extraordinary literary gift of the sixteen-year–old young girl who finished the great work within a few weeks. Miles Franklin has had a long-lasting impact on Australian literary life through her endowment of a Australia’s most prestigious literary award known as the Miles Franklin Award, which is an annual literary prize to encourage and support writers of Australian literature and is awarded to "a novel which is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases".The award was set up according to the will of Miles Franklin, who is best known for writing My Brilliant Career and for bequeathing her estate to fund this prestigious award. “women reject both imitation and protest two forms of dependency—and turn instead to female experience as the source of an autonomous art, extending the feminist analysis of culture to the forms and techniques of literature”. The three phrases overlap sometimes and the special significance of My Brilliant Career lies in its spanning the three phrases mentioned above
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