With this new novel, Kate Grenville returns to her own family as the subject of her fiction and tells the imagined story of her maternal grandmother, Dolly Maunder. Dolly is the kind of smart, wayward woman who has always fascinated Grenville. Born in 1881 on a sheep farm in New South Wales, Dolly loved school and admired the local young female student teacher: “She was the only woman Dolly knew who wasn’t just at home all day, banging the stove door open and closed, heaving the wet sheets around on washday. It was coming to Dolly slowly, like water seeping into sand: if you were born a girl that was the life you’d have to live. Unless you could find a way out.”
At 14, Dolly is put to work in the busy farm household, whipped by her father if the bread doesn’t rise. She never stops looking for “a way out”, and this unquiet restlessness dominates her life. From then on she rarely stops moving, like a creature afraid of being trapped if she stays in one place for too long.
What kind of way out might there be for a woman like Dolly? She sees that marriage is just another form of servitude for a woman of her class. But in Bert Russell, a man who courts her with patient persistence, she senses a person who sees her as good for more than making babies and doing housework. Bert turns out to be a terrible philanderer, but he’s a good match in the ways that really count: he has faith in her capacities, her business acumen. They start a shop and gradually acquire more businesses: a boarding house, a pub, a grand hotel. He teaches Dolly to drive and she loves “the freedom to go” that comes with being able to “grab her handbag, put on her coat, get in the car and drive off”.
The stories about the grandmother that Grenville grew up with were complicated by her mother’s strained relationship with Dolly, whom she regarded as “uncaring, selfish, unloving”. Grenville attempts to step back from the family narrative and ask, in her clear-sighted way, what on earth might have happened to Dolly to make her such a “cold, dominating mother”. Were her dreams of becoming a teacher crushed by her father? Did this lead her to crush her own daughter’s artistic aspirations and “bully” her into the business of pharmacy, which she hated?
The answers proposed here are all too believable and in many ways tragically ordinary. “Girls were of no account, you learned that early on,” Dolly observes. “Good enough to make the bread and milk the cow, and later on you’d look after the children. But no woman was ever going to be part of the real business of the world.”
Dolly proves that to be wrong. But in that struggle, something of her soul is destroyed, cauterised by all the cruelty and disappointment, the “injustice and frustration” of women’s lot. Her capacity to love her children is fatally compromised. When Dolly embraces her daughter Nance to celebrate her being recognised by her school as “one of our best scholars”, she feels not only “love and pride, but … something else as well, a tangle of complicated feelings. There was something between them, like a splinter in the middle of a hug. It was that little long-lost Dolly Maunder who would have given anything to have the chance to be one of our best scholars.”
This is the tragedy at the heart of Dolly’s story, which is in so many ways a success story of a woman who found a way out. Grenville sees the disappointed child who stands behind the distant, demanding mother and grandmother, and the way that childhood longing haunts her. The novel shows the shadow cast by that loss, the unsolvable tangle it creates, and the terrible scars it leaves.
Dolly is a difficult subject in every sense of the word. She resists the lyricism with which Grenville was able to infuse Elizabeth Macarthur, wife of the notorious early settler John Macarthur and subject of Grenville’s most recent two books. Dolly is not deftly ironic, a charming eccentric or a creative spirit. The gods of capitalism move her, not the muses: she comes alive in the cut and thrust of acquisition, trade, sale, profit. This makes her a tough subject in some ways for a novelist like Grenville, who adapts her prose to the dry, laconic mode of Dolly’s worldview.
And yet the writing sparkles with Grenville’s gift for transcendently clear imagery, such as her description of how Dolly’s father liked to rehearse tales of childhood humiliation: he “told over the hurts like jewels,” she writes, “turning them in his memory so that they flashed with his anger.” These injuries were his most cherished treasures, polished rather than healed.
There is a relentless, propulsive pace to Restless Dolly Maunder: like the workdays on the farm chronicled here, task after task with no breath between them from dawn to dark, the chapters of Dolly’s life stride from one place to the next, never slowing, enduring lows and enjoying successes always with a view to what can be gained and achieved next, reflecting Dolly’s restlessness. The severe emotional repression of everyone in this world means that even climactic exchanges leave much unsaid. At times, it is hard not to wish for more plot or character development.
But the final chapter somehow makes sense of the shape of the story, in the short but impactful meeting it stages between grandmother and granddaughter. The simple, haunting question posed by Dolly to her granddaughter – “Do you love me?” – held for so long in the memory of the author, is reshaped a whole lifetime later through the machine for making empathy that is fiction. The result is a work of history, biography, story and memoir, all fused into a novel that suggests the great potential of literary art as redeemer, healer and pathway to understanding.
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Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville is published by Text on 18 July ($45)
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