4.5★s
Restless Dolly Maunder is the eleventh novel by award-winning Australian author, Kate Grenville. In the late nineteenth Century, Sarah Catherine Maunder is born, the sixth and second-last child of Thomas and Sarah Maunder. She’s quickly known as Dolly by everyone on Forest Farm and in the town on Currabubula. She is lucky enough to have a school teacher who is strict about attendance, recently made compulsory, and enjoys school and learning.

Theirs is a hard, simple life, but at her aunt’s house, “a special pair of scissors just for cutting grapes … told her something important: there was a world beyond the one she knew.” Dolly is smart enough to entertain becoming a pupil-teacher, but that grandiose idea is quickly vetoed by her father: when she leaves school at fourteen, she will be needed on the farm. She soon understands that a life of endless, repetitive chores awaits her, chores that must be done to a standard that pleases her mean father, if she is to avoid punishment.

“Girls were of no account, you learned that early on. 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.”

“What could a woman do but marry, and once you were married you belonged to your husband’s world and had to turn your back on your own. It wasn’t betrayal. It was the way the world was.” Dolly observes “A beautiful woman might have a bigger choice of men. But she had to pick one, and whichever one she picked, she’d still end up a wife, with a life as small as the plainest Plain Jane’s.”

The alternative, remaining a spinster, didn’t bear thinking about: “… their moment had passed, the wave they might have ridden into marriage had broken and ebbed into a bit of foam and washed them up in a back street in Curra with nothing and no one.” So Dolly marries Bert Russell, and they take up sheep farming in Rothesay.

But soon enough Dolly realises that success at farming is at the mercy of the weather. A hailstorm decides it for her: a little shop in Wahroonga is a much better bet. But once that is running well, Dolly finds herself looking for more: before long, she also runs a boarding house in Newport. And from there, a series of pubs get the Dolly and Bert treatment: hard work, improvement, profit. But “…the old restlessness: it seemed to be dyed deep in the fabric of who she was, her need to keep moving.”

Eventually, Dolly has the insight to see that “A woman … couldn’t take her future in her own hands and shape it in the way she wanted. Couldn’t even be a teacher if she wanted, and that was surely a humble enough thing to wish for.” She and Bert weather adverse natural phenomena, a global financial crisis and a world war, noting “You could do your best, but if life wanted to pull the rug out from under you it would find a way to do it.”

She also comes to acknowledge to herself her inability to connect with her children: “She heard herself sliding the pointed tip of sharp remarks at him… somehow she’d let all her own hurts be made into that weapon, and she’d turned it outwards against Frank in particular, the baby of the time of betrayal. He’d grown a surface to deflect the blade, but eventually it had found a place to slip in.”

Basing her novel on the life of her maternal grandmother, Grenville gives the reader a fabulous collision of reality and imagination, interweaving fact with fiction, all of it rich in historical detail, with a marvellously diverse cast of real people and (probably) fictional characters. It does feel like her intention to understand this enigmatic woman is realised.

As always, Grenville renders her era and setting with consummate ease, and descriptive prose is exquisite. A few examples: “Her red curly hair like a shining river glinting with light” and “It gave him a special bitter satisfaction to go over and over the stories of his humiliations … Dolly’s father told over the hurts like jewels, turning them in his memory so they flashed with his anger” and “His life had curved in towards hers, just for that moment, but curved away again like railway tracks, two sets of rails travelling towards different places.”

Only Grenville’s choice to omit quote marks for speech, at times causing confusion, prevents a higher rating. Brilliant Australian historical fiction.
This unbiased review is from a copy provided by Text Publishing.