My Brilliant Career

Set against the hard beauty and narrow expectations of rural Australia, My Brilliant Career follows Sybylla Melvyn, a young woman determined to live on her own terms. Restless, intelligent and unwilling to submit quietly to the life laid out before her, she resists the pressures of class, marriage and convention in pursuit of something larger, stranger and more fully her own.By turns witty, sharp, romantic and unsparing, this classic novel offers a vivid portrait of ambition, frustration and self-invention. Sybylla is one of the most distinctive voices in Australian literature: proud, difficult, funny, passionate and fiercely alert to the limits the world places upon her. Through her, the novel captures both the allure and the cost of independence.A landmark story of youth, desire and defiance, My Brilliant Career remains strikingly modern in its emotional force and its refusal to settle for easy answers.