While Stella Miles Franklin took on the world, her beloved sister Linda led a short, domestic life as a wife, mother and sister. In a remarkable, genre-bending debut novel Amy Brown thrillingly reimagines those two lives - and her own - to explore and explode the contradictions embedded in brilliant careers and a woman's place in the world. Sliding Doors meets Wifedom.
Stella Miles Franklin's autobiographical novel My Brilliant Career launched one of the most famous names in Australian letters. Funny, bold, often biting about its characters, the novel and its young author had a lot in common. Miles went on to live a large, fiercely independent and bohemian life of travel, art and freedom.
Not so her beloved sister Linda. Quiet, contained, conventional, Linda was an inversion of Stella. A family peacemaker who married the man Stella would not, bore a son and died of pneumonia at 25.
In this reflective, witty and revealing novel, Amy Brown rescues Linda, setting her in counterpoint with Stella, and with the lives of two contemporary women: Ida, a writer whose writing life is on hold as she teaches and raises her young daughter; and Stella, a singer-songwriter who has sacrificed everything for a career, now forcibly put on hold. Binding the two is the novella that Linda might have written to her sister Stella - a brilliant alternative vision of My Brilliant Career.
Innovative and involving, My Brilliant Sister is an utterly convincing (and hilarious) portrait of Miles Franklin and a moving, nuanced exploration of the balance women still have to strike between careers and family lives. It gives a fresh take on one of Australia's most celebrated writers and an insight into life now.
This debut novel from poet Amy Brown takes inspiration from Stella Miles Franklin and her autobiographical novel My Brilliant Career to explore sisterhood and changing societal values towards women. In reimagining Stella’s life, Brown follows three different women at different stages of history and following different aspirations. Ida, a New Zealander stuck in contemporary Melbourne during lockdowns, is taking a break from her literary career, cares for her child and teaches My Brilliant Career at a high school. Linda, the sister of the iconic author and posthumous founder of Australia’s most prestigious literary prize, struggles to find her voice under the shadow of the more confident Stella. In the last section, a New Zealand famous singer and performer reflects on what she has given to her career and her passions and what the costs are, as her personal life comes crashing in.
From the finely-tuned ear of a poet, there are beautiful twists in the language and innovative uses of metaphors, but is grounded in the real, tangible lives of women. It reads easy with arresting moments of insights. There is a fun blending of genres, taking inspiration from both classical and contemporary fiction, as well as life-writing. Great for fans of Anna Funder’s Wifedom or Kate Grenville’s fiction.
- Claudia