Here is the strangest chapter in the story of the novel now conquering Netflix: its author was so tormented by its success that she pulled it out of print and forbade its republication for the rest of her life. My Brilliant Career did not return to bookshops until 1965 — more than sixty years after it appeared, and a decade after Miles Franklin was dead.
Why would a writer bury her own triumph? Because the book was too close to the bone, and everyone knew it. Sybylla Melvyn’s voice was so vivid, so plainly drawn from Franklin’s own girlhood, that readers and neighbours assumed the novel was her life — its portraits of family and suitors photographs, its heroine a confession. Franklin, private and prickly, found the assumption unbearable. To be praised was one thing; to be read as though she had handed the world her diary was another. She came to feel the book had exposed her, and she shut the door on it.
It is the peculiar agony of the autobiographical first novel, and few writers have felt it so acutely. The very thing that makes My Brilliant Career immortal — the unmediated closeness of that teenage voice — was the thing its author could not live with. She spent the next forty years writing at a careful distance, even hiding behind a pen name, as if to prove she was more than the girl on the page.
The Erato Press edition tells the whole of that story in a critical afterword — the book she wrote, the fame she fled, and the decades of silence before the world was allowed to read it again.
Read My Brilliant Career — the Erato Press edition →
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