“My Brilliant Career” Was the Sleeper Hit 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?