Introduction: Brilliant careers?

My Brilliant Career (1901) is the story of a young woman growing up in the outback who yearns to be an author. The novel has an iconic status in Australian literature and the success of Brilliant Career enable its author to finance Australia's most prestigious literary prize, the annual Miles Franklin award. Yet as any reader knows, the title is deeply ironic; it is used in the novel to describe the exhausting farm labor that Sybylla endures for much of her childhood in rural New South Wales and that makes her dream of a literary career seem remote.