When Miles Franklin received her six complimentary author’s copies of My Brilliant Career in September 1901 at her family’s property, Stillwater, twenty kilometres south-west of Goulburn, she was a few weeks short of her twenty-second birthday. It must have been a moment of intense pride to hold the sturdily bound copy of her first novel, published by the distinguished Edinburgh firm of William Blackwood & Sons.

The book received many positive, though not uncritical, reviews both in Australia and Britain. In the Bulletin of 28 September, under the heading ‘A Bookful of Sunlight’, A.G. Stephens, the doyen of Australian critics, wrote:

It is the very first Australian novel to be published … the book is not a notable literary performance; but it is fresh, natural, sincere – and consequently charming … Her book is a warm embodiment of Australian life, as tonic as bush air, as aromatic as bush trees, and as clear and honest as bush sunlight.