My Career Goes Bung - Couverture souple

Stella Miles Franklin was born in the Australian bush in 1879. At the age of twenty-one, she became an international publishing sensation with her first novel, My Brilliant Career. More than a century later it remains an Australian classic. Miles' early success gave her entree to literary and socialist circles in Sydney and Melbourne. By 1906 she decided to travel overseas, and went to work for the women's labour movement in Chicago. In 1915 she relocated to London and worked for various feminist and progressive causes, all the while continuing to write. A prolific author of plays as well as novels and archetypal bush stories, she often submitted work under pseudonyms that she guarded fiercely all her life. In the 1930s she returned to Australia and determined to take up the cause of Australian writing and writers. Her endowment of the Miles Franklin literary award not only surprised all who knew her, but founded an Australian literary institution that remains our most prestigious.

'Sybylla, with her touching charm, her impetuosity, her inappropriateness, ranks with the great romantic figures of the nineteenth century'. - The London Times In this sequel to Miles Franklin's famous novel My Brilliant Career, once again we encounter the enchanting Sybylla Melvyn. She's a little older now, catapulted from bush obscurity into sudden fame with the publication of her autobiography. Sybylla goes to fashionable Sydney to further her career in the literary world, but her patrons, her critics and her innumerable suitors meet more than they bargained for in the wilful Sybylla. My Career Goes Bung was written in 1900 but was not published until 1946, considered too audacious and perhaps too revealing of its creator's own persona for publication.