We first saw Sybylla, the heroine (in every sense) of My Brilliant Career, at a society gathering in 1900 Australia reciting a poem she’d written. After much racy talk of ‘forbidden fruit’ and ‘secret places’, it went on to describe a man as ‘a whisky breath seeking to possess something that will never be his’. We next saw her a month earlier when she was living with her family on their small, failing farm. ‘Women should swear,’ she told her sister. ‘They should eat like a man, ride like a man, decide their fate like a man.’

Sybylla, then, it seemed safe to deduce, is a feminist. Which, as it transpires, is pretty much the entire plot.

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The reason for her social elevation is that she’d been invited to move to Caddagat, a large estate owned by her aptly named grandmother Mrs Bossier (Anna Chancellor), so that she could bag a rich husband. Sybylla, naturally, wasn’t keen on the husband part but decided that she needed to experience the world before she could fulfil her dream of becoming a writer.

On her arrival in Caddagat, her effect was the traditional one for a........

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