For everyone Shining bright: teacher Amy Brown tells us about her new novel
Managing the chaos of parenting a toddler while teaching remotely during lockdown, Amy Brown found herself in need of a break – and a chance to write. “There was this novel that had been building inside of me for almost a decade and had reached a kind of fever pitch and I needed to get it done.”
Originally, she had assumed the novel would be a heavily research-based investigation into the life of Australian author Stella Miles Franklin and, more specifically, her sister Ida (nicknamed ‘Linda’ in real life and Gertie in Franklin’s famous 1901 novel), who married the man Stella would not, bore a son, and died from pneumonia aged just 25.
“It came from a very real question I had when I first read My Brilliant Career in my 20s about whether Franklin had a real sister,” Amy says. “There was one line in particular that seemed so dismissive of her younger sister’s emotional and intellectual capacity – she pities her ‘pretty peacemaker’ sister for choosing a life of self-sacrifice and drudgery – and I wondered if there was a real sister and how she might have felt about the book.”
Eventually, Amy started delving into library archives. “That’s where I found Linda and her letters, and she sounded much more vibrant and rebellious and energetic than the portrait of Gertie in My Brilliant Career. That interested me and made me want to keep writing in her voice. At what point did her life diverge from Stella’s and why were they so different?”
A decade on, Amy found herself still grappling with the same questions but now they had taken on a more personal dimension. “I was working on the historical centre of the novel before I had a child and became a school teacher, when I had the luxury of time and thought I could do a great deal of research. Virginia Woolf talks about the person shaping the work, and I think the shape of a woman’s life leads to a particular kind of novel.”
The result is My Brilliant Sister (published by Scribner), a novel with three distinct parts that interlink in emblematic ways, each mining a different angle on the tensions and sacrifices women confront when making decisions about their lives.
“I didn’t set out to deliberately include teaching, but I write about my immediate experience and, for the character who resembles me, it is a large fact of her life.”
At the centre of the novel, Amy reimagines the inner life of Linda through a version of events written to her famous sister. This is bookended by the stories of two women who could be contemporary versions of Stella and Linda.
In the third section, the pandemic has brought internationally acclaimed singer-songwriter Stella home to New Zealand. In an isolated cabin (aka ‘bach’) by the sea, Stella claims to be taking a break but clearly something other than COVID is disturbing her equilibrium.
The book opens with the story of Ida, an academic who has moved from New Zealand to Melbourne where her husband has landed his dream job. There, she tries to balance parenting their young daughter with her work as a high school teacher (face to face and then online), missing her family back home, and yearning to pursue her own writing.
“That’s what really sparked the whole project,” Amy says. “Despite assuming that I was a feminist, I was still adhering to some quite traditional values, and it felt valuable to recognise and explore that. In a way, Stella and Linda became the two sides of that dilemma – between art and life.”
Inevitably, Amy’s experiences as a secondary teacher (currently at Princes Hill Secondary College) have found their way onto the page. “I didn’t set out to deliberately include teaching, but I write about my immediate experience and, for the character who resembles me, it is a large pressure or fact of her life.” The switch between teaching and writing can be challenging, she says, but she considers them “both creative, and complementary.”
My Brilliant Sister, shortlisted for the Victorian Premier’s Prize for an Unpublished Manuscript, is Amy’s debut novel for adults. But she is an established author, having already published three collections of poetry, four children’s books, and various essays and reviews, on top of her PhD from the University of Melbourne.
Amy’s next novel is at an embryonic stage, but she has been pondering the divide between public and private education in Australia. “I think it’s partly to do with coming from New Zealand, where private education is not nearly so common and there was no funding towards it; and, also, being the child of teachers who had strong feelings about the importance of public education,” she says. “It’s a political and cultural question and that’s what makes it so complex and ingrained in our culture. And so ripe for interrogation.”
