Can one spoil a TV series based on a 125-year-old novel? I won’t, but let the record show that I badly want to. Netflix’s My Brilliant Career, a six-part adaptation of the book by Australia’s Miles Franklin, seems so obviously to be doing one thing that its reversal is a gut punch. I watched the full run with some interest, then went away wishing I hadn’t. Like the 1901 tale from which it is adapted, Netflix’s series presents audiences with a romantic fable set Down Under. Our protagonist, Sybylla Melvyn (Philippa Northeast), is a 20-something farm girl living in contented poverty in the Australian bush. Sent by her parents to visit a grandmother and aunt, Sybylla yearns only to write and vows to use the trip to fuel her fiction. Her mother and father, however, have other ideas. The homestead is in debt, the lenders are closing in, and only Sybylla’s successful marriage can save the family from ruin. Readers of George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë will recognize some of these plot points. What is more surprising — indeed, what has the tinny ring of contrivance — is Sybylla’s slogan-based feminism, a belief system whose particular expression wouldn’t have been out of place on the Bryn Mawr quad in 1965. “I want to create, not procreate,” the young woman tells her sister, practically brandishing a handmade placard. “Women should swim, they should swear, they should eat like a man.” Um, if you say so.