The Project Gutenberg eBook, My Brilliant Career, by Miles Franklin

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Title: My Brilliant Career

Author: Miles Franklin

Release Date: March 17, 2004 [eBook #11620]

Language: English

Character set encoding: US-ASCII

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MY BRILLIANT CAREER***

E-text prepared by an anonymous Project Gutenberg contributor

MY BRILLIANT CAREER

MILES FRANKLIN

1901

PREFACE

A few months before I left Australia I got a letter from the bush signed
"Miles Franklin", saying that the writer had written a novel, but knew
nothing of editors and publishers, and asking me to read and advise.
Something about the letter, which was written in a strong original hand,
attracted me, so I sent for the MS., and one dull afternoon I started to
read it. I hadn't read three pages when I saw what you will no doubt see
at once--that the story had been written by a girl. And as I went on I saw
that the work was Australian--born of the bush. I don't know about the
girlishly emotional parts of the book--I leave that to girl readers to
judge; but the descriptions of bush life and scenery came startlingly,
painfully real to me, and I know that, as far as they are concerned, the
book is true to Australia--the truest I ever read. I wrote to Miles
Franklin, and she confessed that she was a girl. I saw her before leaving
Sydney. She is just a little bush girl, barely twenty-one yet, and has
scarcely ever been out of the bush in her life. She has lived her book,
and I feel proud of it for the sake of the country I came from, where
people toil and bake and suffer and are kind; where every second
sun-burnt bushman is a sympathetic humorist, with the sadness of the bush
deep in his eyes and a brave grin for the worst of times, and where every
third bushman is a poet, with a big heart that keeps his pockets empty.

HENRY LAWSON

England, April 1901

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

INTRODUCTION
ONE. I REMEMBER, I REMEMBER
TWO. AN INTRODUCTION TO POSSUM GULLY
THREE. A LIFELESS LIFE
FOUR. A CAREER WHICH SOON CAREERED TO AN END
FIVE. DISJOINTED SKETCHES AND CRUMBLES
SIX. REVOLT
SEVEN.