“My Brilliant Career” Is the Best Show of the Summer

In the recent TV adaptation of the classic Australian novel “My Brilliant Career,” from 1901, a childhood of running, swimming, and speaking freely in the bush comes to an abrupt end. Sybylla Melvyn (Philippa Northeast), the dreamy eldest child of a large, mostly female brood, is told by her mother early in the pilot that arrangements have been made for her to go live with her maternal grandmother (Anna Chancellor), a society matron whom the young woman has never met. At the family estate, Sybylla, who nurses inchoate hopes of becoming a writer, is to be remade into a suitable wife. Sybylla joins her grandmother but shrugs off all matchmaking efforts, until she learns the reason behind them: her parents can no longer afford her upkeep, and their best chance at averting financial catastrophe for the remaining children is for Sybylla to marry rich. The wide-open skies above her new home come to feel like a mockery of her circumstances, promising a boundlessness that remains out of reach.

The author Miles Franklin wrote “My Brilliant Career,” her first and most enduring novel, in her teen years, as an ode to the female self-determination to which she herself aspired. (The title is ironic; the book ends with a nineteen-year-old Sybylla facing an uncertain future.) Franklin’s work was the beginning of a feminist lineage: in 1979, Gillian Armstrong’s film adaptation reportedly became the first feature to be directed by an Australian woman in nearly half a century. Jane Campion, the foremost female auteur to emerge from the Antipodes, credits the movie for inspiring her own brilliant career; watching the film, she thought, “God they’re going to let girls do it too.”

Netflix’s pop-feminist retelling of Sybylla’s adventures, from the showrunner Liz Doran, is a slicker and sweeter affair than Armstrong’s beloved movie, which features a breakthrough lead performance of feral mercuriality by Judy Davis. But Northeast’s performance, which emanates joy and a guileless sensuality, deserves to be as much of a launchpad to stardom. The six-part miniseries, which was released last month, is no less a discovery—the hidden gem of the summer, if not the year. Part bildungsroman, part romance, Doran’s fizzy yet intelligent interpretation is as self-assured as its protagonist, with anachronistic flourishes that pay homage to Sybylla’s spirit of subversion. It’s the sort of show that you need to remind yourself to slow down and savor, lest you swallow it in one go.

Franklin saw her fiction as a contribution to a nascent national literature, and the Australian context remains central to the series’ appeal. Unlike Jo March or Elizabeth Bennet, to whom Sybylla is often compared, our heroine is a blend of the modern and the pastoral—a mix that casts off the pastel primness of so many period adaptations to embrace a natural splendor and an earthy restlessness. Sybylla never looks more like herself than when her unbrushed, waist-long hair is covered in leaves after a morning spent lying in a field; the apparently bare ruddy complexion that Northeast sports in multiple scenes looks like an honest depiction of a life in the sun, but also an image from some far-off future where women can truly be unburdened from the labor of beauty. Sybylla’s relocation from the outback to the manor initially feels like a transition from freedom without opportunity to opportunity without freedom, but Doran cleverly moves the book’s eighteen-nineties setting up to the first few years of the next century, when Sybylla is able to catch glimmers of a world to come. Shortly after her arrival at her grandmother’s, in 1900, Australia transforms from six British colonies into a single, largely self-governing commonwealth. In the show, women gain the right to own property, and the campaign for female suffrage is in the air—though not within Sybylla’s family. (Her aunt Helen demurs, “I don’t like to make a fuss.”) But for those like Sybylla, who have trouble living within today’s constraints, tomorrow’s unknown possibilities are intoxicating.

Sybylla’s bridge to her potential new future is most often her grandmother’s unlikely best friend, Augusta (Kate Mulvany), a wealthy crusader for women’s causes who decides to champion Sybylla’s literary ambitions. Witchy and worldly, with a tendency to name-drop the luminaries she’s encountered on her travels, the grande dame is Sybylla’s first example of a woman who chose her own way and has been rewarded for it. Augusta’s encouragements to Sybylla are genuine, but her main motivation is personal rather than political: by directing Sybylla’s energies toward publication, she hopes to deter the impoverished young woman from contemplating a union with her nephew, Harry (Christopher Chung), whose shaky fortunes will affect her own. But, in the idealistic Harry, Sybylla finally meets a man who can see an unconventional woman as a partner to commend and enjoy, rather than to tame or endure. After Sybylla scandalizes her neighbors by reciting a horny, angry poem at Augusta’s birthday party, Harry pays the ultimate compliment to a budding writer by repeating her words back to her, despite the verses reducing men to “a whiskey breath behind closed doors / Seeking to possess / Something that will never be his.” Is there a more potent aphrodisiac than a man’s selfless admiration of a woman’s talents?

Doran wants to make her adaptation both a swoon-worthy love story and something that transcends mere romance. She succeeds in both regards. Her update features many of the period-dramedy tropes that “Bridgerton” and its revisionist copycats have standardized: pop covers, the introduction of queer and nonwhite characters, and a distinctly contemporary sensibility when it comes to social-justice matters. But no series I’ve seen has woven these motifs into a historical setting so convincingly, perhaps because here they feel like manifestations of Sybylla’s own forward-looking values. They also help flesh out the supporting characters considerably. Augusta’s vocal preoccupation with a wide range of feminist issues—from her volunteer work on behalf of “fallen women” to her indignation at the devaluation of domestic arts—helps underscore the conditionality of her feminism, which, however sincere, is readily sacrificed for the maintenance of her class position. Meanwhile, Doran’s inclusion of Nell (Sherry-Lee Watson), a gifted horse trainer of Aboriginal origins who befriends Sybylla, offers an alternate vision of female passion and defiance.

It helps that, in contrast to “Bridgerton,” Sybylla’s world is not a colorblind one. The earlier series has increasingly strained credulity by having its romance plots hinge on inequalities of gender and class, but seldom of race. “My Brilliant Career” explicitly takes place within a colonial history, and Sybylla, for all her powers of observation, has plenty to learn from those of differing societal vantage points. She has limited context for the occasionally radical opinions that Nell espouses, and, at a town gathering, she is shocked by the racist taunting that Harry, whose mother was Chinese, receives, arguably for the pair’s cross-racial friendship. The series wisely uses its larger canvas to sketch out a complicated land beyond Sybylla’s blossoming—one which suggests that the secondary characters, too, are on their own journeys, even if their destinations aren’t as far-flung as Sybylla’s.

Harry’s mixed heritage also provides a more organic obstacle to his turn-of-the-century union with Sybylla, even as the pair’s chemistry deepens from sparkling to smoldering. In spite of the pedigree afforded him by his high-born Australian father, it would behoove him to wed a deep-pocketed blue blood who can open doors for him. The series makes clear that the young men in Sybylla’s vicinity are taught to look upon marriage as transactionally as she is, and Harry, despite his idealism, may have no more choice than she in following his heart. A long-lashed Englishman (Jake Dunn) emerges as a wan challenger, but Harry’s true rival is Sybylla’s career, which proves, for her, even more elusive than a worthy man. With no models to follow, ascertaining what kind of writer she wants to be—and what the world will allow—ends up a decidedly lonesome endeavor, full of false turns and rude awakenings. The story’s lack of triumph—Sybylla ends the narrative having published no work—intially feels counterintuitive to such a sunny production, but it is boldly apt. Sybylla’s truest achievement is, ultimately, not her romantic or literary success, but having the imagination to write her own happy ending. ♦

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