Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society’s long-locked doors were finally starting to creak ajar for women. Born into a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, she spent her restless life pushing at those doors.
Kate Grenville writes the story of her grandmother, as she imagines it from a few photos and a couple of anecdotes. It’s the story of a woman before women could get out of the home, it’s fascinating and so horrifyingly mundane. There is despair in these pages, but this kind of despair is felt only by the narrator: everyone around her thinks she’s in a completely normal situation. The modern reader is horrified not really by Dolly’s quite normal life, but by the fact that this normal life is the only life she could ever had led.
I loved this novel.
Around the World Challenge: Australia