Written by Miles Franklin when she was still a teenager, the novel follows Sybylla Melvyn, a young woman growing up in rural New South Wales who wants more from life than marriage, domestic usefulness, and becoming another sensible woman pressed flat by circumstance.
Sybylla is poor, clever, vain, furious, theatrical, observant, and alive in that dangerous way young women are alive when they can see the shape of the trap before anyone else admits there is one. She wants art, independence, language, beauty, movement, admiration, and escape. Instead, she gets family obligation, class pressure, colonial boredom, gendered expectation, and the suffocating instruction to be grateful for whatever narrow life is handed to her.
She is not sweetened into virtue or punished neatly into realism. She can be annoying, brilliant, self-dramatising, generous, cruel, perceptive, and absurd within the same paragraph, which is to say: she feels like a person. The novel moves between bush realism, satire, romance, autobiography, social critique, and artistic manifesto, often with the slightly feral energy of someone writing faster than the world can catch up.
A&R Classics paperback edition, published by Angus & Robertson in 1974. Originally first published in 1901. Some light shelf wear to cover, including minor creasing and rubbing to corners/edges, with a small crease/lift to the lower front cover corner. Pages are clean and readable with expected age-toning. A solid vintage reading copy.
