How remarkable it would be if we could take those stiffly posed portraits of our forebears preserved in dusty photo albums and breathe life into them. In Restless Dolly Maunder Kate Grenville has performed that magic. Born in 1880, Dolly Maunder was Grenville’s grandmother. In piecing together fragments of memories, family lore, old letters and photographs, Grenville has reincarnated a woman silenced by history.

Intrigued by her research for One Life: My mother’s story, Grenville resolved to find out more about her grandmother. Two generations back may not be a big leap in years but it is in terms of social and cultural ideologies.

Dolly was the first in her family to go to school. ‘Sharp as a tack’, a quick learner and yearning to make her mark on life she spurned a woman’s destiny of wife, mother, or spinster. At the end of the 19th century, opportunities for women like Dolly were dreams. Impatient, restless and headstrong, she raged against fate to no avail and as time went on ‘if onlys’ came to sour that once buoyant spirit.

Unremarkably women like Dolly Maunder have been erased from the historical record, but it was their hunger for change that culminated in the freedoms, opportunities and privileges we enjoy today. Women who were ‘funnelled into a smaller life than [they] deserved’.

Grenville’s achievement in this deeply moving book is that in resurrecting the woman behind her grim-faced grandmother, she’s given us insight into a generation too easily dismissed as archaic, narrow-minded, inflexible and slightly ridiculous. Yet again, she’s transformed faded history into something pulsing and alive.

Reviewed by Anne Green

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

I’ve been writing with a view to being published since I was 16. Though it took me 12 years to see my first short story in print. Since then I’ve published 16 books. Ten of them are fiction, three are books about the writing process, one is a biography (of my mother), one is a memoir (about the research and writing of The Secret River, my best-known book), and one of them is a science-y book about fragrance.

I’ve been lucky – many of these books have won prizes, three have been adapted for the screen, and one had sell-out runs at Adelaide and Edinburgh Festivals as a play.

I was born in 1950 and grew up in Sydney. My first job was at Film Australia, editing documentary films. Then I went to Europe and the US for five years, working and studying (I did an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Colorado). When I came back home I worked for several years at the Special Broadcasting Service as an editor of subtitles, then became a freelance writer, reviewer and teacher of Creative Writing. Several grants from the Australia Council let me go on writing between those part-time jobs.

A version of The Secret River was the thesis for a Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Technology Sydney, and I’ve also been privileged to be granted honorary doctorates from Sydney University, Macquarie University and the University of NSW, and an award for Lifetime Achievement in Literature from the Australia Council. I was honoured to receive the Order of Australia in 2018.

Visit Kate Grenville’s website