Cal Flyn, a a freelance writer and reporter from the Highlands of Scotland, is the author of
Thicker Than Water. One of her ten top books about the Australian bush, as shared at the
Guardian:
My Brilliant Career by Miles Franklin
Stella “Miles” Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career (1901) when she was only a teenager, and it was an immediate hit, printed with a foreword from Henry Lawson. Franklin was “born of the bush”, he said, and her story of a bookish, headstrong farmgirl was full of “startlingly, painfully real” descriptions of rural life and land (although “the girlishly emotional parts”, he added, were “for girl readers to judge”). Free-spirited Sybella struggles against society’s limiting expectations of women, and dreams of a life of art, literature and theatre as sandstorms whip the walls of her family’s lonely homestead. Closely autobiographical – so much so that some neighbours sued Franklin after its publication – this coming-of-age classic is also a proto-feminist text.
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--Marshal Zeringue
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