In her new novel, Kate Grenville takes her grandmother as muse. Weaving familial histories with graceful prose, she uses memory and research to reimagine the life of Dolly Maunder – bringing into being a textured, nuanced appraisal of intergenerational dynamics.
Born in New South Wales in the early 1880s, Dolly is part of a sprawling sheep-farming family. Quick and intelligent, she excels at school. There, Dolly learns that women can live beyond the scope of the domestic. One of the student teachers is ‘the only woman’ she knows who isn’t ‘at home all day, banging the stove door open and closed, heaving the wet sheets around on washday’. Gradually – ‘like water seeping into sand’ – Dolly grasps the idea that the life ahead of her does not promise much in the way of liberation. ‘If you were born a girl,’ Dolly realises, ‘the life you’d have to live’ was that of obedience. Unless, of course, ‘you could find a way out’. Locating a doorway to autonomy, however, proves difficult within the societal confines of the period.
At the age of 14, like most girls, Dolly leaves school. She works in the familial home, the shadow of her father staining her days. Yet Dolly retains her sense that there is more to life than this obedient drudgery. She earns the eponymous epithet of ‘restless’ from the fact that she pushes at the boundaries set down upon her because of her gender – boundaries that are, gradually, flexing at the seams. Dolly is part of a ‘transition generation’, out of which is birthed the prospect of ‘a different future’ for women.
Marriage presents a trap – but also a potential window to freedom for Dolly. Bert Russell, whom she eventually weds, seems to understand that she is more than simply a reproductive vessel or domestic skivvy. While Bert has a wandering eye, he also allows Dolly space to exercise her faculties through business – and, eventually, teaches her to drive. Together, they build a string of enterprises, which leads to financial success.
Yet Dolly is not invulnerable to the structures of misogyny that surround her, or immune to enacting them upon others. While she finds some sense of liberation through her engagement with capitalism, she inflicts the wounds of intergenerational trauma upon her own daughter – Grenville’s mother, Nance – which leads to interesting writerly positionalities the author explores in the novel.
The scope of Nance’s view of Dolly – who forcefully trampled her daughter’s dreams of an artistic career in order to direct her towards a life of relative financial independence – shifts Grenville’s narrative to a place of speculative understanding. Grenville moves to enact a distant reading on her own family history, in an attempt to understand how her grandmother was shaped into appearing ‘uncaring’, ‘unloving’ and ‘dominating’ to her children. Here, the liberties of fiction allow Grenville to theorise, freeing her to examine the subtleties and ‘complicated feelings’ of her family’s history.
In her closing chapter, ‘Thinking About Silences’, Grenville writes towards an acknowledgement that the life of her grandmother took place on the ‘taking of land’, but that the personal archive of remembered family histories from which she wove the novel ‘record no awareness of the enduring sorrow all the taking meant – and means – for First Nations people’. She recognises that the history of her family is but ‘one story’, and that ‘standing beside it is another’, which, while recognised, goes untold.
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In Restless Dolly Maunder – which successfully interweaves memoir, biography and remembrance of things past into a nuanced piece of fiction – Grenville has produced a novel that is unafraid of pushing the scope of what it means to unpick the intricacies of family history. There is a tenderness to the weight of the realities Grenville offers us – an awareness that love can wound, but that it can also redeem.
Restless Dolly Maunder, Kate Grenville
Publisher: Text Publishing
ISBN: 9781922790330
Pages: 256pp
Publication Date: 18 July 2023
RRP: $45.00
