With this new novel, Kate Grenville returns to her own family as the subject of her fiction and tells the imagined story of her maternal grandmother, Dolly Maunder. Dolly is the kind of smart, wayward woman who has always fascinated Grenville. Born in 1881 on a sheep farm in New South Wales, Dolly loved school and admired the local young female student teacher: “She was the only woman Dolly knew who wasn’t just at home all day, banging the stove door open and closed, heaving the wet sheets around on washday. It was coming to Dolly slowly, like water seeping into sand: if you were born a girl that was the life you’d have to live. Unless you could find a way out.”
At 14, Dolly is put to work in the busy farm household, whipped by her father if the bread doesn’t rise. She never stops looking for “a way out”, and this unquiet restlessness dominates her life. From then on she rarely stops moving, like a creature afraid of being trapped if she stays in one place for too long.
