40 pages • 1 hour read
Miles (Stella) FranklinMy Brilliant Career
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 1901A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 18-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 18 Summary: “As Short As I Wish Had Been the Memory of Sermons to Which I Have Been Forced to Give Ear”
Impulsively, Sybylla confides in Aunt Helen the truth of the run to the post office. Helen frets over whether Sybylla and Harry have had sex, or what she terms “something more than common politeness” (52). Sybylla assures her aunt that the answer is no, because she “is branded with the stinging affliction of ugliness” (52). The aunt cautions Sybylla not to trifle with Harry’s heart. Sybylla assures her he is too conceited to be toyed with.
Chapter 19 Summary: “The 9th of November 1896”
That week, Australia, then part of the United Kingdom, celebrates the Prince of Wales’s birthday. The family is off for the annual horse race near Five-Bob Down. Sybylla’s uncle cautions her to be wary of Harry Beechum, whose temper is notorious. Sybylla can hardly believe the man is capable of any strong emotion: “I wished I could see a little of it” (55). The neighbors gather for the picnic, including the Beechums, and Sybylla notices one striking woman, Blanche Derrick, paying particular attention to Harry. Sybylla recalls, “She was the kind of woman with whom men become much infatuated” (57).
Chapter 20 Summary: “Same Yarn (Continued)”
Harry tells Sybylla she and her aunt will be spending the night at Five-Bob as their guests. After the horse race, more than 20 friends head to the Beechum home for a dinner. Sybylla is aware of the attention men pay her, and when the party moves to the drawing room and there is dancing, she accepts all the attention. Given the heat of the Australian summer, the dancing soon stops, and Harry and Sybylla walk in the garden. Sybylla senses Harry is upset over her behavior. He asks her flat out, “Yes or no?” (58). Sybylla guesses this is his offer of marriage—no talk of love, just the question. She says yes. He stoops to kiss her, but something in Sybylla resists his “calm air of ownership” (58). She reaches for the nearest object, Harry’s riding crop, and smacks him smartly across the face. She sees a stir of anger, but he dismisses the smack as a “trifling accident” (59). As the two return to the dinner, Sybylla is mystified. She wonders why, of all the women he could have, he proposed to her.
Chapter 21 Summary: “My Unladylike Behavior”
Helen and Sybylla return to Caddagat the next morning. Later that day, Harry rides up with a diamond engagement ring, a family heirloom. Sybylla makes a deal with him. She says she will wear his ring for three months to see whether they are still happy. Harry agrees. After he departs, Sybylla’s grandmother warns her about her “immodest” (61) behavior with a man any girl would be flattered to wed.
Over the next several weeks, Harry and Sybylla spend much time together, but Harry says nothing about the arrangement: “He was so cool and irritatingly matter-of-fact I wished the three months to pass so that I might be done with him” (62).
Chapter 22 Summary: “Sweet Seventeen”
On the last day of November, Sybylla turns 17. The family arranges a party and invites neighbors. Sybylla, feeling joyous, is determined to get a rise out of the even-tempered Harry and deliberately flirts with several young men at the party. Harry watches sullenly. They leave to pick strawberries for dessert.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Ah, for One Hour of Burning Love, ‘Tis Worth an Age of Cold Repose”
Without warning, Harry grabs Sybylla by the wrist and pulls her close to him. She recalls, “I could feel the heart of his body, and his big heart beating wildly” (66). He gets right to the point: He will not have a girl wearing his ring “act as that with other men” (66). Coolly, Sybylla slips off the ring and returns it to him. She tells him, “Go and get a beautiful woman to wear your ring and your name” (67). Almost as soon as Harry leaves, Sybylla regrets her actions, apologizes, and suggests they start over. Harry is confused, but Sybylla explains that she is nearly sure she loves him, but he “never took the time to make [her] fond of [him]” (68). She promises to stop flirting with others. All is settled: “It had been a very happy day for me” (69).
Chapters 18-23 Analysis
In these chapters leading up to Sybylla’s acceptance of Harry’s proposal, the novel recycles and then deconstructs the familiar elements of a romance. Harry reveals less savory aspects of what appear to be his exceptional character. Even as this section opens, Sybylla receives an odd warning from her uncle: Beware, he says, of Harry’s trigger temper. The notion that Harry, so serenely cool, could ever lose his temper strikes Sybylla as amusing and misinformed. That conclusion reminds readers that they are dealing with the first-person perspective of a very young girl.
This section juxtaposes two symbols of Sybylla’s transition from naïve girl to empowered woman: One, the riding whip she grabs impulsively to strike Harry when he presumes ownership of her; and two, the expensive diamond engagement ring that Sybylla takes on a probationary status and then returns it to a stunned Harry, before taking it back.
Henry’s proposal scene, in which he says, “Tell me, will it be yes or no?” (58), scene is jarringly unconventional. After watching Sybylla flirt with men at the dinner, Harry offers marriage baldly without the ornaments of emotional declarations of love. This is a disturbing manifestation of Harry’s unsettling air; he fashions his proposal into a threat or ultimatum. Sybylla says yes, but she feels an inexplicable hesitancy. Something in Harry’s tendency to treat a marriage more like a business deal puts her on alert.
Perhaps this is not the friendship love Aunt Helen told her about—it lacks the critical element of respect. Instinctively, Sybylla understands she will not be owned. When Harry tries to kiss her, which to him signifies the deal completed and the transfer of Sybylla, she grabs the only handy weapon and strikes him across the face with a riding crop. The gesture suggests her need for empowerment—this horse will not be controlled. That Harry dismisses the hit is not so much a measure of his gallantry as it is an indication that he simply does not take Sybylla seriously.
Sybylla’s apology and noncommittal attitude toward the ring reflect the understandable hesitancies expected from a teenage girl struggling to decide a titanic issue like her future. But the doubts as represent the tension in Sybylla between what society expects her to do and what her heart tells her. As a young woman on the threshold of adulthood, she is not inclined to trust her instincts. Harry seems perfect. But the more Sybylla watches his behavior, the more she sees him as a person, rather than what society thinks he is She feels in Harry’s character an unsavory sense that he believes marriage is ownership, that she is his to claim, and—most disturbingly—that any resistance will be met not by respect but by restraint.
In this, the novel manipulates the emotional distance between the reader and Sybylla. When Sybylla accepts the ring after her 17th birthday party and after Harry’s petulant display of anger, the reader understands what Sybylla as a teenage girl does not: She is making the wrong move. Thus, the joy she expresses in the closing pages of these chapters—“sweet, sweet thoughts of youth and love” (69)—are juxtaposed to her examining her new bruises, the “many marks and black” (69), a reminder of Harry’s harsh treatment of her that afternoon. When Sybylla joyously and unironically proclaims, “It had been a very happy day for me” (69), the reader is happy that this is the not the close of the novel and that Sybylla still has much to learn.
