My Brilliant Career

My Brilliant Career is a classic Australian work published in 1901 by Stella Miles Franklin, with an introduction by Henry Lawson. A thinly veiled autobiographical novel, it paints a vivid and sometimes grim picture of rural Australian life in the late 19th Century. Sybylla Melvyn is the daughter of a man who falls into grinding poverty through inadvised speculation before becoming a hopeless drunk unable to make a living from a small dairy farm.