Netflix’s My Brilliant Career review: How did a radical feminist classic get flattened into a love triangle?

Goodness, if Netflix delivers one more confusing love triangle under the guise of feminist awakening, I may actually combust. Why is every period adaptation now required to resolve itself into some variation of Never Have I Turned Pretty With The Walter Boys, XO? When did 'a woman chooses herself' become Hollywood shorthand for 'a woman chooses between two men, agonisingly, for six episodes'?

Forgive the rage. It is the entirely predictable consequence of reading a book then watching its adaptation miss the point of it entirely.

The book is My Brilliant Career, written by Miles Franklin and published in 1901, when she was just twenty-one. Set in rural New South Wales at the turn of the century, it follows the fierce, biting and headstrong Sybylla Melvyn, who refuses to be boxed into marriage because she wants something far more dangerous: To become one of the great writers of her generation. Whelp, from all the ladies clutching pearls back then.

My Brilliant Career is semi-autobiographical. Franklin wrote it on an impoverished family farm while doing her chores, and she wrote it into a moment of genuine national combustion. Australia's six colonies had just federated into a single nation in 1901, the same year the novel appeared. And it was a moment of transformation for women specifically: South Australian women had won the right to vote in 1894. the first in the country, and among the first in the world, to also win the right to stand for parliament , and federal suffrage followed with the Commonwealth Franchise Act of 1902.

Franklin didn't write Sybylla in a vacuum. She wrote her directly into that friction ,a young woman digging her heels into Australian soil at the exact moment the ground beneath Australian women was shifting.

Netflix's 2026 adaptation, led by Philippa Northeast as Sybylla and Christopher Chung as Harry Beecham, follows the novel's basic shape: Sybylla is pulled from her modest family home in Possum Gully to her wealthy grandmother's estate at Caddagat, where everyone expects her to pick a husband. She insists, repeatedly and with real bite, that she has no need for a man, the world she wants is bigger than that. Harry Beecham becomes a genuine distraction; another man circles at the edges. And then the show slides into familiar romantic-triangle territory, steamy in places, right up to the moment Sybylla turns Beecham down after what read like real, breathless promises.

Here is what stings: the show's own writer, Liz Doran, has said in interviews that she was consciously trying not to repeat the mistake of the beloved 1979 film adaptation, which she felt narrowed the novel down to "one aspect of the book, framing Sybylla's quest around a central love story." That was the whole critique available to her, and by the account above, the new version still ends up leaning hard on the very structure it set out to avoid, however updated the soundtrack.

The frustration isn't that a triangle exists in the source material, a version of it does. It's that the show inflates it into the emotional centre of gravity, while the political and social context that gives Sybylla's refusal its actual meaning gets sanded down. The result is a heroine who doesn't read like a woman resisting against enormous social pressure, on a career, yet instead, like a young woman leading two men on and walking away unbothered. Ambition becomes a footnote to romance instead of the other way around. Instead of a woman clawing her way toward a name for herself against a nation still deciding what it thought women were for, we get a woman generating heartbreak with no particular remorse attached.

None of this is a knock on the performances. Northeast is genuinely magnetic as Sybylla, headstrong, funny, chafing visibly against her own corsetry, both literal and social. Chung gives Harry real verve rather than stock-love-interest blankness. The fault sits upstream of them, in a broader pattern: recent classic adaptations tend to go one of two ways. Either they modernise a text Fleabag-style, breaking the fourth wall and injecting anachronistic irony (see: Netflix's Persuasion), or they keep the costumes and setting but switch out the book's actual feminist argument for a more easily marketable romance plot. My Brilliant Career is a frustrating case of the second.

What made the novel radical in 1901 wasn't that Sybylla almost got engaged. It's that she said no, structurally, to the entire premise that marriage was the finish line a woman's story was supposed to run toward. She chose the harder, lonelier, less filmable ending: work, ambition, and an uncertain future entirely of her own making, in a country that had only just started arguing about whether women got a say in anything at all.

A Netflix era that keeps reaching for the love triangle as its default feminist grammar isn't wrong that Franklin's novel is timely. It's wrong about why. The relevance was not about who Sybylla almost chose. It lay in the fact that she was allowed, at twenty-one, on the page, in 1901, to choose nothing and no one, and call that a brilliant career anyway.