My Career Goes Bung
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My Career Goes Bung is a novel by Miles Franklin.
Often characterised as the sequel to My Brilliant Career, My Career Goes Bung is actually an early postmodern classic, the fictional autobiography of a young Australian farm girl, Sybylla Penelope Melvyn, who has written a fictional autobiography (My Brilliant Career) and threatens to be consumed by its success.
Franklin herself, only 21 when My Brilliant Career was published in 1901, was undoubtedly distressed by the great numbers of readers who wrote to her identifying her with Sybylla, and wrote My Career Goes Bung the following year, she says, “as a corrective”. However, it was rejected by Angus & Robertson, the major Australian-based publisher, not just for its overt feminism, as is often claimed, but more likely for its clearly recognizable, and less than flattering, portraits of society figures and, in particular, Sybylla’s mock affair with a thinly disguised Banjo Patterson; and was not finally published until 1946, after the manuscript which had been lost during the First World War was finally rediscovered.
