Restless Dolly Maunder

  

After the success of Kate Grenville's exploration of her mother's story in One Life, Grenville went back another generation to explore her maternal grandmother's life in Restless Dolly Maunder. Dolly appears in One Life as a difficult, sometimes cold and demanding woman; in Restless, she comes fully into focus as an energetic, thwarted character who could have achieved so much more if she'd been allowed the same freedoms and opportunities as a man.

Interestingly, while One Life was classed as a biography, Restless Dolly Maunder is published as a novel. I guess Grenville felt that the gaps she had to fill with imagination and speculation were that much larger for her grandmother than for her mother. In some ways, I didn't serve Dolly Maunder well by reading her book straight after One Life, because it covers much of the same ground and I didn't feel I was encountering a new person, though Dolly's story is much more fleshed out and she is more sympathetic than her portrayal in One Life.

I enjoyed Restless Dolly Maunder for the same reasons that I loved One Life: it's a window into a life that would have otherwise gone unremarked and uncelebrated, a life of a courageous, smart, determined woman who did her best with the hand she was dealt, sometimes at the cost of her closest personal relationships. (Her husband's infidelities also played a role, to be fair.) Kate Grenville has mined her family's history to great effect, I could read any number of these stories, but I guess she might have run out of material by now.