Mirrors on misery

In Restless Dolly Maunder, Kate Grenville weaves a fictional narrative around her grandmother, a woman she remembers as ‘aloof, thin, frowning, cranky’, and knew through her mother’s stories as ‘uncaring, selfish, unloving. Even a bit mad.’

Dolly Maunder left no written records of her own: no memoirs, letters, diaries, or even account books to show how she carved out a life or filled it with meaning. What Grenville knows of her has been garnered from a sparse historical record, family stories, and – richest of all – the fragments of memoir Dolly’s daughter (and Grenville’s mother), Nance, left behind when she died. Grenville has previously used some of this material in her biography of her mother, One Life (2015). Nance’s memories were coloured by the question that haunted her even on her deathbed: ‘Why did my mother never love me?’ Retelling her stories now, Grenville tries to separate them from Nance’s pain and invest them, instead, with Dolly’s. It is a generous act of imagination that gives the novel much of its emotional clout.

The historian in me found the complex layering of research, memory, and imagination in this book its most fascinating aspect. I kept wanting to puncture the seamless narrative, to question the origin of each new anecdote, and seek out the dissonant points of view that find expression in the singular voice of the fictional ‘Dolly Maunder’. But Grenville does not encourage such speculative reading: her account of her personal and historical quest appears only as a postscript. Unlike One Life, Restless Dolly is a novel and should be read as such. From the opening pages, we are invited directly into Dolly’s world by an authoritative narrative voice that sits – if not quite inside Dolly’s head – somewhere very close to it.