Restless Dolly Maunder by Kate Grenville

What makes a woman stern and forbidding towards her children? Why would they grow up feeling unloved? Kate Grenville’s grandmother was a woman like that. And when in her later years she regretfully asked the question of little 5 year-old Kate, “Do you love me Cathy?” the child’s answer was “No”. Grenville’s latest novel Restless Dolly Maunder is an attempt to understand that aloof and unloveable woman that was her grandmother.

Dolly Maunder was a young woman in the late 1880’s, living in rural Currabubula, NSW. As a child she liked going to school, she was “clever little Dolly”, rewarded with the teacher’s star. She thought she might like to be a teacher too, but the response from her father was a resounding “Not over my dead body”. She was a girl, her place was in the home, there was work to do, and one day she would be married, and carry on with the household work and rearing children.

Grenville masterfully captures the drudgery of women’s daily work at that time. One of the first jobs was to prepare meals for the men on the farm.

But before you could put the butter on the bread you had to churn the cream, and before you  could churn the cream the milk had to be set out …, and before that the cow had to be milked,  and before you could milk the cow you had to … etc.

The long litany of tasks turns into a chain of syllogisms, which drag on to be repeated day after day. And then one day you married, and you started the same chores over again. Dolly becomes bitter and resentful of the freedom that man take for granted, and that feeling of entrapment finds its outlet in her relationship with her children. In wanting better choices for her daughter, she finds herself repeating the same mantra “Not over my dead body”, overriding her daughter’s wishes and insisting that Nance study pharmacy. Nance might be offered a different future but the overriding forcefulness is the same.  

Restless Dolly Maunder is a reminder of the struggle that women had to undertake to be recognised as individuals with the right to make their own choices and their own future. Dolly Maunder may not have got it completely right, but she struck out as hard as she could to make it happen. With the result that today Kate Grenville is a woman making her own career with wonderful books that highlight the experiences of women in the past, their struggles not forgotten.

Themes: Historical fiction, Women's rights, Independence.

Helen Eddy