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'‘Sometimes I think there are a great many women behind, and sometimes only one, and she crawls around fast, and her crawling shakes it all over.’ ' 'The Yellow Wallpaper' ~ Charlotte Perkins Gilman
'On stage, a woman named Sybil Jones is making a speech. She is talking about the significance of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story 'The Yellow Wallpaper'. Behind her sits a panel of writers, facing their audience, and one writer drawing Sybil’s likeness in a contemplative daze.
'The Sybil in the writer’s drawing starts to move, like the women behind Gilman’s wallpaper. She shakes. She takes the writer by the hand and leads her down into the paper, into the dark recesses of her mind, and into Australia’s past — into the real and imagined lives of Australia’s women writers.
'Drawing Sybylla is a novel about the challenges women writers have faced in pursuing the writing life.' (Publication summary)
Notes
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Dedication: For my family - for holding everything.
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Epigraph:
'I am given to something which a man never pardons in a woman. You will draw away as though I were a snake when you hear it.' With this warning, Sybylla confesses to her rich and handsome suitor that she is given to writing stories and bound, therefore, on a brilliant career.
-- Publisher's endorsement for Miles Franklin's My Brilliant Career, Centenary Edition, 2001.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Doodling in the Margins
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Women's Book Review , vol. 28 no. 1 2019; (p. 38-43) 'DRAWING Sybylla is a magical spell, casting us back to view the struggles of Australian women writers and their demands to be heard. The novel comprises two components, the women’s stories and the interspersed “Between the Chapters…” which follow the narrator, an author herself, and her journey in learning these women’s stories. In the beginning of the novel our narrator, at a conference, is listening to Sybil Jones talk about Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and begins to sketch the speaker before her. As if magic is at play, our narrator travels through her drawing of Sybil into an alternative universe and is invited to learn of the struggles that women have faced when writing in Australia’s past. The woman guiding the narrator in this magical realm, the flâneuse as Kelada terms it, our narrator calls Sybylla.'(Introduction)
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Sybil
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 397 2017; (p. 61)
— Review of Drawing Sybylla 2017 single work novel'Drawing Sybylla is a wonderfully unusual book, narrated in parts by a modern-day Sybil – one of those ‘mad mouthpieces’ of prophesy and poetry from Ancient Greece. This Sybil springs to life from an elaborate doodle in a notebook, drawn by a Sydney Writers’ Festival panelist who is listening to another writer on her panel. This writer is describing to the audience a feminist short story from 1892, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, a work in which a woman, diagnosed by her physician husband as suffering ‘a slight hysterical tendency’, is confined to a single room to rest and recover, and slowly descends into madness, beginning to see other women moving behind – and trapped behind – the intricate patterns of the wallpaper. And it is this wallpaper, these figures, that come to form the central metaphor of Kelada’s book – as the suddenly animated ink figure, aptly named Sybylla, invites her creator to step behind the wallpaper and into its pattern, and examine the lives of other women writers, in Australia, across time.' (Introduction)
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The Trials of Female Writers Are Far from Over
2017
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 4 November 2017; (p. 22)'There was a time when being both a writer and someone’s wife was such a vexed combination that the reality of it proved nearly impossible, and countless books went unwritten.' (Introduction)
-
Sybil
2017
single work
essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 397 2017; (p. 61)
— Review of Drawing Sybylla 2017 single work novel'Drawing Sybylla is a wonderfully unusual book, narrated in parts by a modern-day Sybil – one of those ‘mad mouthpieces’ of prophesy and poetry from Ancient Greece. This Sybil springs to life from an elaborate doodle in a notebook, drawn by a Sydney Writers’ Festival panelist who is listening to another writer on her panel. This writer is describing to the audience a feminist short story from 1892, ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’, a work in which a woman, diagnosed by her physician husband as suffering ‘a slight hysterical tendency’, is confined to a single room to rest and recover, and slowly descends into madness, beginning to see other women moving behind – and trapped behind – the intricate patterns of the wallpaper. And it is this wallpaper, these figures, that come to form the central metaphor of Kelada’s book – as the suddenly animated ink figure, aptly named Sybylla, invites her creator to step behind the wallpaper and into its pattern, and examine the lives of other women writers, in Australia, across time.' (Introduction)
-
The Trials of Female Writers Are Far from Over
2017
single work
review
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 4 November 2017; (p. 22)'There was a time when being both a writer and someone’s wife was such a vexed combination that the reality of it proved nearly impossible, and countless books went unwritten.' (Introduction)
-
Doodling in the Margins
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Women's Book Review , vol. 28 no. 1 2019; (p. 38-43) 'DRAWING Sybylla is a magical spell, casting us back to view the struggles of Australian women writers and their demands to be heard. The novel comprises two components, the women’s stories and the interspersed “Between the Chapters…” which follow the narrator, an author herself, and her journey in learning these women’s stories. In the beginning of the novel our narrator, at a conference, is listening to Sybil Jones talk about Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and begins to sketch the speaker before her. As if magic is at play, our narrator travels through her drawing of Sybil into an alternative universe and is invited to learn of the struggles that women have faced when writing in Australia’s past. The woman guiding the narrator in this magical realm, the flâneuse as Kelada terms it, our narrator calls Sybylla.'(Introduction)
