My Brilliant Sister is rife with doubles, and characters representing the opposing forces of domesticity and career – embodied by Ida and her brilliant “he” in part one. In part two, we enter Ida’s novel, reimagining the events of (the fictional) My Brilliant Career from (real-life) Linda’s perspective, seeded with fragments of Ida’s own experience and feelings. For example, Linda’s “you just didn’t care to wonder how I smoothed your passage through each day” (directed at Miles) echoes Ida’s resentment towards her partner.

The novel’s final part inhabits an “art monster” twin Ida imagined for herself at the end of part one: Stella, a world-famous musician recording an album, in the New Zealand Ida yearns for. (Both Miles and Sybylla dreamed of a music career.) Here, the domestic–career dichotomy is embodied in Stella’s friendship with Linda, a school friend once similarly passionate about music, now married with a child. This Linda compares Stella’s onstage absorption to “how I feel when I clean”.

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It’s hard not to read as grim confirmation of (novel-within-a-novel) Miles’ conclusion that womanhood is “a lifeless life”. But My Brilliant Sister works to reclaim the value of domesticity, while acknowledging its drudgery. It does this more successfully in part two, when Linda imagines a fictional avatar comparing laundering to alchemy: “Isolde, like the miller’s daughter spinning straw into gold for Rumpelstiltskin, turns the pile of dry, dirty shirts, hose, petticoats … into flat, wet empty skins hanging clean on the line.” Brown has published three volumes of poetry, and it shows: the novel is replete with such gorgeous imagery.

Reflecting on projecting herself into Jane Eyre, imaginatively assembling its fictional world through her knowledge of her own, Linda reflects “that’s how fiction works, doesn’t it?” Through her mosaic of mirrored details across various story worlds – drawn from within and outside the novel, all springing from Ida’s brain – Brown brilliantly demonstrates that’s how fiction is written, too.

My Brilliant Sister rewards active reading. For example, you don’t need to read My Brilliant Career, but if you do, you’ll find Sybylla’s “very queer voice” has been given to part three’s musician Stella. Rachel Cusk appears in a dream: a name-check that echoes the novel’s interrogation of the boundaries of motherhood and self.

Miles Franklin wrote My Brilliant Career at only 16, so it’s perhaps unsurprising that this is a far more sophisticated – though at least as strange and original – meditation on womanhood than its inspiration. I loved living in the world of this novel.

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