Published by Australian author Miles Franklin (full name Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin) in April 1901, My Brilliant Career was a hit in its day, and has been reincarnated as a movie, a play and as musical theatre. A Netflix version was only a matter of time.
Franklin’s book is both an Australian literary milestone and a feminist classic, its original publication having coincided with Australian women’s struggle for voting rights. It tells the story of Sybylla Melvyn (Philippa Northeast), an imaginative girl with literary aspirations whose family is drowning in poverty and debt. Her desperate parents send her away from their home in Possum Gully to live with her grandmother Mrs Bossier (Anna Chancellor), who lives in some splendour on an estate called Caddagat, in the hope of improving her prospects. After all, if she can find a wealthy husband, she’ll be able to bale out her struggling parents. As her mother laments, “the only way a woman can have money in this world is to marry into it."
Mrs Bossier is indeed bossier than most, and handles Sybylla with an hauteur so frosty that it’s as if she’s determined to show the most class-conscious toffs back in the Old Country that they ain’t seen nothing yet. If one says “can I?”, Mrs Bossier will pedantically correct it to “may I?”. If you greeted her with “g’day, sheila”, she’d drop dead with shock.
Sybylla arrives fully armed with a kit of emancipationist opinions, indignant at the way women are automatically relegated to subservient roles to men and can’t expect to hold positions of power and influence. “Women make up half the world and give birth to all of it,” she points out. “How is it making a fuss to ask for equality?” In one of her regular letters to her sister Gertie (Ella Oliphant), she deplores the way “I’m being gussied up, straightened out and slowly turned on the spit of propriety.”
Yet, however much she may loathe the social supremacy of the male of the species, Sybylla begins to find that her life is becoming more Mills & Boon-ish than she would have anticipated. Handsome young men keep appearing in her life, and she finds them rather alluring. Frank Hawden (Jake Dunn, pictured above with Anna Chancellor) is an Englishman employed as the foreman at Caddagat, and a whiff of potential romance is immediately in the air. Then again, there’s the rival allure of Harry Beecham, played by Christopher Chung (alias the insufferable Roddy Ho in Slow Horses), who Sybylla also finds quite interesting, especially when she catches a glimpse of him taking his shirt off to reveal a gym-toned physique beneath. How is a young lady to choose? However, realpolitik slaps her in the face when she overhears the men discussing her as though she was merely a pawn in their boy-power games.
On the other hand, there’s also Harry’s aunt Augusta (or Gus), who looks like Bette Midler’s twin sister, and she vigorously espouses a gung-ho, all-you-can-eat attitude to life. In fact she makes the menfolk look rather colourless and two-dimensional. She’s played with effervescent joie-de-vivre by Kate Mulvany (pictured above), delivering such flavourful aphorisms as “parties are for champagne and gossip”. It’s Gus, too, who energetically champions Sybylla’s ambitions as a writer.
My Brilliant Career makes for breezy but somewhat cartoon-ish viewing, an effect intensified by the jarring use of modern pop songs on the soundtrack. It’s a bizarre production choice which instantly destroys the otherwise persuasive sense of period. Predictably, showrunner Liz Doran has also introduced a checklist of 21st Century Issues, absent from the original novel.
There’s a running strand about attitudes towards Australia’s Indigenous people, thrown into focus by the affair between farm hand Nell Kirby (Sherry-Lee Watson) and a white policeman. There’s also a secret homosexual relationship which threatens to bring ruin upon its protagonists, as well as a twist in the story about the missing husband of Aunt Helen (Genevieve O’Reilly). But if nothing else, it’s worth watching for Northeast’s smart, funny and very touching portrayal of Sybylla.
