Author of 1901 novel My Brilliant Career and namesake to two of Australia’s most prestigious literary prizes – the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin – Stella Maria Miles Franklin is embedded in our cultural history.
Like many writers before her, Amy Brown takes inspiration from the feminist icon in her captivating debut novel – but instead of telling Franklin’s story, the novel focuses on three women whose lives carry direct and indirect echoes of her: Ida, Linda and Stella.
The story of these three characters – two in the present, one in the past – is told over three separate parts, which together offer a thoughtful reflection on the domestic and creative ambitions of women in Australia.
The first is set in modern Australia. Ida is stagnating in Melbourne’s endless Covid lockdowns, which have coincided with the early years of motherhood. Her relationship is similarly unfulfilling, with her partner disappearing into his research each day, forcing her to leave her own writing to the side.
By way of escape, or perhaps in search of recognition, Ida loses herself in My Brilliant Career and the biography of the real-life Stella Franklin, whose seeming indifference towards her own sister (also named Ida, although nicknamed Linda) raises enough ire in contemporary Ida that she’s compelled to write about it.
This is the trigger for the novel’s second part, which is Ida’s fictional reimagining of “Linda” Franklin’s life. Younger and less boisterous than her sister, Linda Franklin feels left behind when Stella goes to live with their grandmother – a move which ultimately sets her on a path for a life of creativity and independence. Linda resigns herself to a life of “contentment”, but mulls over being left to a domestic life, and is frustrated at the lack of significance afforded to it.
The third part returns us to the present, and to a musician, also named Stella, who has avoided domestic life altogether, and drifts in the wake of lockdowns, a breakup, and the hangover of her last successful album. Just as Linda reminds us that fulfilment might sometimes be found in the domestic, Stella shows that independence and creative freedom can be lonely and uncertain.
The novella-like layering of these three sections allows Brown to poke around behind the facades of domesticity and creative success, exposing a nuanced reality that may be at odds with our expectations. Through multiple perspectives, she avoids prescribing which type of life is the “right” one: Ida finds time within parenthood for her creative work, while Stella finds herself fantasising about family.
Of the three, Linda’s life is probably the least interesting, maybe because her fictionalised story is pinned down by the trappings of historical fact, or because her voice lacks the contemporary vitality of the others. It doesn’t help that she’s the offsider in her own story: the whole of her narrative is addressed to the “you” of her absent sister Stella, rendering her own aspirations less important. But her story plays a necessary role here, showing how domestic pressure can lead to creative discontent, and providing the historic and creative scaffolding that the novel is built from.
The search for self via the other is a topic that writer and academic Naomi Klein unpacked brilliantly in her 2023 release, Doppelganger. Brown digs into the same topics, but on a smaller level. When Ida is confined to her bed, enduring the dragging rasp of pleuritis, she still has to look after her daughter – a scene that parents will find all too familiar. As Ita reads her one of her favourite childhood stories, her description of the pair in bed evokes a kind of nesting, or burrowing in:
Lying with her under a blanket, reading the stories that were read to me when I was sick, I am doubled, tripled; I am my mother and myself and my child. I don’t know if it’s empathy or narcissism that spreads me so thin.
Is the search for self narcissistic? Or is it the thing that enables us to make connections, to love?
Like her fictional Ida, Amy Brown moved from New Zealand to Australia, where she lives with her husband and son, and has also taught creative writing. The autofictional elements give her book another parallel with My Brilliant Career, which begins with an introduction from Stella Miles Franklin: “This story is all about myself.” Franklin goes on to make “no apologies for being egotistical … Other autobiographies weary one with excuses for their egotism. What matters it to you if I am egotistical?”
Women’s stories and the significance of their interior lives are too often dismissed as narcissistic navel gazing. In My Brilliant Sister, Brown, like Franklin, like many other peers and predecessors, celebrates the kind of egotism that allows women to see themselves as significant, and their stories – creative, domestic and otherwise – as worthwhile.
My Brilliant Sister by Amy Brown is out now through Scribner Australia, $32.99
