My Brilliant Career: 264 (Virago Modern Classics)

Review Unashamedly high-spirited and romantic ― COMPANYA splendidly vivid display ... carrying the reader by force of its narrative and its sharply detailed, entirely convincing voice ― THE TIMES Product Description First published in 1901, this Australian classic recounts the live of 16-year-old Sybylla Melvyn. Trapped on her parents' outback farm, she simultaneously loves bush life and hates the physical burdens it imposes. For Sybylla longs for a more refined, aesthetic lifestyle -- to read, to think, to sing -- but most of all to do great things.Suddenly her life is transformed. Whisked away to live on her grandmother's gracious property, she falls under the eye of the rich and handsome Harry Beecham. And soon she finds herself choosing between everything a conventional life offers and her own plans for a 'brilliant career'. Book Description *The story of a young girl's dreams, aspirations and melodramas told with zest and verve by the 16-year-old author About the Author Miles Franklin (1879-1954) was born into a pioneering family settled in New South Wales, Australia. She wrote My Brilliant Career when she was only sixteen. Publication in 1901 brought instant fame and a notoriety that was so unwelcome that she forbade its republication until ten years after her death. Miles Franklin then went to America, where she worked for the Women's Trade Union League, and later to London and Salonika, where she did war work and was political secretary for the National Housing Council. In 1933 she returned to Australia, where she spent the rest of her life. My Career Goes Bung, the sequel to My Brilliant Career, was published in 1946, and her autobiography, Childhood at Brindabella, posthumously in 1963.Carmen Callil was born and educated in Melbourne, Australia, and came to the UK in 1960. She began working in publishing five years later and in 1972 founded the Virago Press, which she continued to chair until 1995. Her first book, Bad Faith: A History of Family and Fatherland, was published by Vintage in 2007. It was shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize.