Miles Franklin · 1901 · coming-of-age

Miles Franklin wrote this at nineteen and published it at twenty-one. Sybylla Melvyn is clever, plain by her own account, and stuck on a dairy farm her father has drunk into the ground - and the book is her refusing, at some cost, every route out of it that involves marrying somebody.

1. 1
   Bruggabrong

   The cattle station of her early childhood in the high country, remembered as prosperity and happiness - and sold, with two others, by a father whose livestock deals stop working at about the same time his drinking starts.

2. 2
   Possum Gully

   A thousand-acre farm near Goulburn, and the family drops from swelldom to peasantry in a few years - the mother thin and soured, the father slovenly, and a girl of nine doing the work of a farmhand.

3. 3
   Caddagat

   Her grandmother's homestead, modelled on Talbingo where Franklin's own grandmother lived - books, a piano, conversation and Aunt Helen, and the only stretch of Sybylla's life that resembles the one she wants.

4. 4
   Five-Bob Downs

   The neighbouring station and Harold Beecham, who is rich, patient and entirely serious about marrying her - and whom she horsewhips across the face when he takes hold of her, and who proposes anyway.

5. 5
   Barney's Gap

   Sent as governess to the M'Swats to pay off her father's debt: a filthy house, a broken piano, no book but farm records, and children who despise her - and it breaks her down until she is sent home ill.

6. 6
   Possum Gully

   Back to the milking and the mud, with her prettier sister sent to Caddagat in her place. Harold comes for her a second time with his fortune restored, and she says no - and writes the book instead.