Miles Franklin is Australia’s progressive literary star. A feminist and staunch supporter of women in the arts, her novel My Brilliant Career (1901) was written when she was a teenager, but it remains a testament to the electric energy of a teen girl of ambition who thinks she’s just too smart and too ugly for this world. We’ve all been there.

Follow wild-haired Sybylla as she picks up her pen to try and write her way out of oppressive poverty in rural Australia, her father’s drinking debts, and obscene marriage proposals that simply cramp her style.