She might have gone to Sydney, to become a performer, guided by a family friend, lawyer Everard Grey. She blossomed, and her insecurity about her appearance and her disappointment with the world began to slip away. Sybylla was in her element, with time to indulge her love for the arts and performing, and with an appreciative audience her grandmother, aunt and uncle were amused and entertained. It was a much bigger, much more prosperous farm, and it was much closer to society. In the end she decided to send Syblla to her own mother on the family farm. It was hardly surprising that Sybylla’s preoccupation with books, music and drama drove her poor mother to distraction. had tried to improve his family’s situation, but he gambled and lost. Her mother came from a good family and her father, a working man. It was a hard life you were either working or you were sleeping there was nothing else. That’s not easy when you’re the daughter of a poor farmer from Possum Gully. She’s maddening andshe’s utterly charming …īut the most important thing about Sybylla, the thing that she doesn’t ever quite say, is that she wants to set her own path in life, to be mistress of her own destiny.

She’s also nearly impossible to explain a curious mixture of confidence and insecurity, tactlessness and sensitivity, forthrightness and thoughtfulness …. If you took equal amounts of Becky Sharp, Cassandra Mortmain and Angel Devereaux, if you mixed them together, with verve and brio, and you might achieve a similar result, but you wouldn’t quite get there, because Sybylla Melvyn is a true one-off. In 1901 a remarkable heroine made her debut, in a book that purports to be her autobiography.

My brilliant career author