My Brilliant Career: Australia’s answer to Pride and Prejudice

“I’m ashamed to say that I’d never heard of the 1901 novel ‘My Brilliant Career’ by Miles Franklin,” said Anita Singh in The Telegraph. Having watched the new Netflix adaptation, I have now “devoured it in one sitting”.

Described as Australia’s answer to “Pride and Prejudice”, it tells the story of a young woman “kicking against convention in turn-of-the-century Australia”. Sybylla Melvyn (Philippa Northeast) is an aspiring writer who has grown up running wild on her family’s outback farm. She is sent to live with her well-to-do grandmother (Anna Chancellor), who hopes to teach her how to be a lady and bag a husband.

Sybylla, who wants nothing more than to be an author, rationalises that she must “fully experience the world before I can write about it”, said Luke Buckmaster in The Guardian. Soon, she encounters a potential suitor, Harry Beecham (Christopher Chung), who in this version is Chinese-Australian and “totally ripped”. Sybylla becomes involved in a love triangle with Harry and an English visitor, Frank.

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The six-part series is “steamier” than the novel, and at times “a tad syrupy”. But it has “pluck and sass”, and Northeast gives an “entertaining, high-voltage performance”.

The series “takes a very 2020s approach” to early 1900s Australia, said James Jackson in The Times, with a gay subplot, and another involving a young Indigenous horse trainer. It’s easy to make it sound “pretty naff”, but “My Brilliant Career” is “self-aware” – and thanks to Northeast’s “terrific performance”, it is highly enjoyable.