My Career Goes Bung

My Career Goes Bung / Miles Franklin
London: Virago, 1981, c1946.
234 p.

I just finished this book, after reading My Brilliant Career,the first one in this set, nearly three years ago. This second book was finally published in 1946, but it was written in 1902, shortly after the first book had made such a splash. I am counting it for 1902 in my Century of Books reading, as the theme and context is so much of its written era -- in the intro, Franklin says that she has not altered or updated her original manuscript but has left it in its original state. 

She also says that the reason it was not published in 1902 was because the publisher balked at the feminist and irreligious nature of the text. And those threads run throughout the whole book, in what was to me the most delightful part of this story. As she notes:

I hung on secretly to my faith that the greatest nations would always be those where women were freest.

This book is a fairly complicated piece of metafiction, too -- after the first book was published, there was a furor, with many readers thinking that the novel was autobiography. Franklin eventually withdrew publication, so bothered by this assumption she didn't want any more notoriety. But this second book, written hard on that experience, relates the character Sybylla's career after her first book: Sybylla withdraws publication and tells the 'truth' about her life and what this sudden literary success meant for her. It's a marvellous mix of biography and a fictional character's standing in for it, very postmodern indeed. 

While the plot is a little meandering and the ending quite unsatisfying in some respects, the writing is as lively and amusing as ever. Sybylla is a little less naive but she still has a clear eye on Australian society. She goes into wider society in Sydney for a while so has a bigger scope for her commentary as well. A lot of her asides deal with the way that men assume they are better than women, or the way in which religion has created an old man god to supplement these feelings of male superiority. She has no time for all that. 

I can never understand why men are so terrified of women having special talents. They have no consistency in argument. They are as sure as the Rock of Gibraltar that they have all the mental superiority and that women are weak-minded, feeble conies; then why do they get in such a mad-bull panic at any attempt on the part of women to express themselves? Men strut and blow about themselves all the time without shame. In the matter of women's brain power they organise conditions comparable to a foot race in which they have all the training and the proper shoes and little running pants, while women are taken out of the plough, so to speak, with harness and winkers still on them, and are lucky if they are allowed to start at scratch. Then men bellow that they have won the race, that women never could, it would be against NATURE if they did.

This book is fascinating in form, powerful in statement, and enjoyable as an entertaining read that is still terrifyingly relevant in its social commentary even today, after more than 100 years.