A different take on My Brilliant Career: Is Sybylla pan, bi or lesbian?

Actors Judy Davis and Sam Neill, in the 1979 film My Brilliant Career.

Sometimes, the generational difference is jarring and revelatory. For example, the cultural touchstone in this nation that is My Brilliant Career. I devoured the Miles Franklin novel as a young teen, then saw the Judy Davis film with my best friend, aged 13. We left that movie wailing, “She didn’t marry Harry,” and this became a mantra of astonishment during our high school years; a periodic cry of despair over a heroine who didn’t run off with the bloke.

How very dare she. Our heroine, Sybylla, left her Harry for a brilliant career in writing. She actually said no to that gorgeous man (tipping the hat, Sam Neill) so she could live freely, with her exhilarating mind, and as teenagers we did not quite approve. The sentiment was – Goodness, what a twit! Sybylla really should have married that dishy man.

In this era I took my daughter and her teenage friend to see a play of My Brilliant Career. The girls left the theatre furiously debating whether Sybylla was pan, bi or lesbian – and the question of marrying Harry never entered the equation. Because, well, why would she? When a gloriously wide world awaited her. A life of exhilarating work and freedom; a brilliant, self-determined life. Sybylla backed herself, as these young girls do. Because, well, why wouldn’t you?

Sybylla backed herself, as these young girls do. Because, well, why wouldn’t you?

I heard another blazing woman speak this year who also backs herself, and always has, even when the headwinds were so very strong against her. Jane Campion introduced a documentary on her oeuvre, a look back at her brilliant career by a French female filmmaker. The 69-year-old master of cinema talked about her early days. The men on set, who she didn’t like, who made it difficult for her as their director. The message: Jane Campion is not a pleaser. As she told her rapt audience: “Why do I need to be friends with them? They worked for me. They just had to do their job.” It was so instructive. She wasn’t on that set to have the men around her like her. They were there for a job and she treated them as such. She backed herself. More women need to have that blazing fortitude.

Which brings me back to the young women of today. A study by the Girlguiding organisation polled several thousand girls aged between seven and 21 and found that they’d prefer to be homeowners by the time they’re 30 – as opposed to getting married. Priorities. And how the world has shifted.

Girls are learning the power in backing themselves. Having self-belief – that phrase which was drummed into my generation as a sin of arrogance and delusion. We weren’t quite allowed to believe in ourselves, to back ourselves to live a bigger, wider, more audacious life. An early profile of me as a young novelist stated in its opening paragraphs that I had self-belief, and made it sound like something distasteful and unseemly. But if I didn’t have that, I would have had very little to propel me onward; I would have stopped. Somehow, through all the noise, I backed myself.

“Men are praised for ambition, and women are accused of it,” novelist Barbara Kingsolver stated after winning this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction. “The readership is there, the writership is there, but the respect is not,” she told a Times reporter. Kingsolver explained that in the early days of her career, she experienced “so much opposition, suspicion, contempt” from journalists and literary gatekeepers. “It took a long time for me to work out that what they were really asking was, ‘Am I, as a woman, allowed to write about these big things?”

A question that Miles Franklin would have also faced, of course, as she dared to become a writer. Thank goodness she didn’t marry Harry – as this generation of young women well recognise.