My Brilliant Career
A girl on a farm in the Australian bush wants to be a writer and refuses the future that has been arranged for her. Miles Franklin wrote the novel as a teenager and published it in 1901, and its heroine's stubbornness is the reason it has never gone out of print.
The book is funny, rude and impatient with romance. Sybylla Melvyn is not particularly likeable, and the novel does not ask you to like her; it asks you to understand why she will not settle. The ending is unresolved in a way that still frustrates readers, which is probably the point.
Public-domain status
First published in 1901. In the United States, works published before 1930 are in the public domain. In the European Union the general term is the life of the author plus 70 years; Miles Franklin died in 1954, so this work has been free to republish there since 2025.
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