![]() ![]() Drought means that "the cruel dazzling brilliance of the metal sky" oppresses her capacity to realise her inner brilliance. "My ambition was as boundless as the mighty bush in which I have always lived," writes Sybylla who becomes painfully stuck in the gap between aspiration and achievement. Lingering in the mind are Franklin's lush evocations of the Australian landscape, alternately loved and loathed. "I am afflicted with the power of thought, which is a heavy curse," writes Sybylla, whose intellectual and artistic talents are stifled in "stagnant" Possum Gully where she must toil beneath the burning sun, suppressing her "hot wild spirit". This impassioned debut novel by Miles Franklin – who bequeathed funds to establish the country's most prestigious writing prize, the Miles Franklin literary award – was written when its author was only 16 and glistens with precocious wisdom. "Why do I write? Why does anyone write?" asks the teenage Sybylla, who dreams of pursuing a brilliant career as a writer, but, as she pens a book on "purloined paper", faces heartrending obstacles in 1890s rural Australia, from her family's poverty to societal misogyny. ![]()
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