Sybylla truculently resists her mother’s pragmatic insistence that she become a servant. Deliverance comes via Grandma Bossier, the well-heeled proprietress of a verdant cattle and sheep farm poetically named Caddagat. Grandmother and Aunt Helen (the exquisite Wendy Hughes) take in the rough-hewn Sybylla, smooth out her rough edges, and give her a good polish. Their object: to marry her off so that she will no longer be a burden to her parents or other kin.

Sybylla is not so sure she wants this kind of mate. In this, she is roughly a century ahead of her time. The assumption here—as in Armstrong’s subsequent features—is that women have the same prerogatives as men. Still, Sybylla likes to flirt and is the sort of inconsistent lass who can lead a man on while keeping him at arm’s length.

The man in question is the fetching (and did I say rich?) Harry Beecham (Neill), he of the James Mason voice and hungry eyes that ravish Sybylla and not a few moviegoers. In 1980, I found Neill particularly attractive, and he is lovingly and lingeringly shot in this film. In other words, like the girl in most movies. In retrospect, I realize this was an early experience for me of seeing a male lust object through the eyes of a female director. In any event, never again was Neill quite so delicious, and I can say the same of Mel Gibson in Mrs. Soffel, Bruno Ganz in The Last Days of Chez Nous, and Ralph Fiennes in Oscar and Lucinda.

But while there are love and romance in Armstrong’s films, romance and love are not what they are about. In her entire feature oeuvre, the only wedding I remember is that between Meg March and John Brooke in Little Women. And while there is a fabulous kiss in My Brilliant Career, the first time Harry leans in to buss Sybylla, she hits him upside the head with a riding crop.

The suspense in an Armstrong film generally leads to a fork-in-the-road moment in which the female protagonist must choose between the path well traveled and one less taken. The director dramatizes these moments of decision visually; she is a master of the extreme close-up, alert to the subtleties of mood in the faces of her actors. And she is likewise a master of mise-en-scène, of situating her characters so that the setting, lighting, decor, and costumes enlarge the viewer’s understanding of them.

On her parents’ farm, Sybylla creates the impression of a snorting bull amid Victoriana, kicking up dust with her heavy boots and wounding others with her prickly-pear demeanor. Blessedly, in Caddagat there is rain, and she blooms into an unepected beauty. In a high-angle shot that is the film’s loveliest, she dances around Grandmother’s parlor, the cabbage roses on the rug and botanical patterns of the upholstery appearing to bloom with her. At the McSwatt homestead, where she is sent to work as a governess, she tries to keep tidy and professional but eventually sinks back into squalor, as the children make her the target of their mud-ball games. She is at the crossroads: Where will she go from here?

Armstrong tells us who Sybylla is by showing her taking the lead. She asks men to dance, demands the reins of a carriage, rocks a rowboat in which she is a passenger, and commandeers a polite dinner-party conversation with a ribald joke. When someone at another dinner remarks, “I see that Furlow has bought himself a very fine bull,” Sybylla interrupts, “That should make a few cows happy.” She likes to be in control (who does not?), and every encounter she has inevitably becomes a power struggle.

More insistently than the novel, the film takes aim at “the marriage plot,” the literary device by which narrative conflicts are effectively resolved with a wedding. Armstrong and screenwriter Eleanor Witcombe show why Sybylla may be altar-shy. Her mother and her Aunt Helen both married for love and were betrayed, by an alcoholic and a philanderer, respectively. The one companionate union in the film is the one between the “M’Swat” parents, but they are not Sybylla’s idea of role models. The film is otherwise faithful to the spirit of the novel, though it eliminates one of its heroine’s suitors and adds a satisfyingly flirtatious—and slapstick—pillow fight that, naturally, Sybylla initiates.

There is always a moment in an Armstrong picture when the heroine says something along the lines of Sybylla’s complaint here: “I can’t lose myself in somebody else’s life when I haven’t lived my own yet.” Like most of Armstrong’s films, My Brilliant Career subverts movie genres and viewer expectations. It has the meet-cute and the larkiness of a romantic comedy but ultimately reveals itself as a bildungsroman.

Sybylla Melvyn is the prototypical Armstrong protagonist in that, while she defies the social conventions of her own time, she is in sync with independent-minded women of every era, including our own. Her spirit is tonic—and timeless. Like that of the novelist who created her, the filmmaker who put her on-screen, and the star who brought her to life there.