Towards the end of My Brilliant Sister, a work abounding with literary allusions, reference is made to Jenny Erpenbeck’s The End of Days, a novel in five books. Amy Brown may well have found inspiration in Erpenbeck for the form she takes in this, her complex and multilayered debut. Her major inspiration, though, is Miles Franklin, author of My Brilliant Career, first published in 1901 and revived by the 1979 film starring Judy Davis and Sam Neill. Franklin, whose full name was Stella Maria Sarah Miles Franklin, is an author held as close to Australian hearts as Katherine Mansfield is to ours.
Brown gives us three separate narratives, each told in the voice of the individual protagonists, Ida, Linda and Stella. The characters are distinct from one another in place and time but all share a predilection for intense self-analysis, which is occasionally tiresome. Ida is a contemporary figure, an aspiring writer and English teacher, and mother of a three-year-old, who is enduring repetitive lockdowns. Like Brown, she is a New Zealander relocated to Melbourne. Lockdowns force Ida to teach online, with the added challenges of the child, who at one point amusingly sits on her mother’s shoulders and uses her head as a drum. Any teacher who endured this period will tell you it was hell. Perennial observations and concerns of expatriate New Zealanders are endearingly noted – our identifying accent, our fascination with Australian animals, how we will mistake the eucalypt haze on the horizon for the sea, and recurring homesickness. The partner, referred to only as “he”, is an academic, working on a book. Both are erudite, articulate and determined to write, which gives rise to the eternal debates about domestic duties and who should undertake them. Much of Ida’s section reads like a journal, with a lot of insightful commentary on the writing process.
The second section, “Stillwater”, makes up the bulk of the book. It is a convention of the feminist historical novel to put the blue-stocking adventurer central, who in this case would have been Miles Franklin. Brown concentrates instead on Miles’s younger sister, Linda, who stayed on the farm. While Linda makes the long train journey to her new home in Brisbane with her husband and baby son, she thinks about Franklin, whom she calls by her given name Stella, recalling verbatim their letters to one another. The voice is excellent, using idioms of the time. My Brilliant Career, like many first novels, is closely autobiographical, and caused deep distress to Linda, their parents and uncle. One of the most arresting passages describes the mother’s wordless, self-destructive rage on reading the book. Elsewhere, Linda calls her sister “a preposterous bore”.
The final section is told by a lovelorn, lonely and self-absorbed musician living on the Wairarapa coast. Themes encountered in the first two sections are cycled back – to marry or not to marry, whether to have children, and how to maintain a creative life. Ida’s preoccupation with the notion of having a twin reappears, and the novel ends with Stella echoing her desire to see herself reproduced, the narcissistic thrill of looking into the eyes of the self.
My Brilliant Sister is a writer’s book, probably to be most enjoyed by aspiring writers. Those with some knowledge of Franklin’s work and life will likely love it. Brown’s intellect and keen facility for language pervade every page.
