Restless Dolly Maunder is a fictional retelling of Kate Grenville’s grandmothers life. Born on a NSW sheep farm in 1881, Dolly, the sixth of seven children, was smart, studious, driven and restless. She admired the local young female teacher and her independence, and wanted to become one. But her father said ‘not over his dead body’, and at 14 she was put to work in the house and on the farm and punished for mistakes.

Girls were of no account, you learned that early on. Good enough to make the bread and milk the cow, and later on you’d look after the children. But no woman was ever going to be part of the real business of the world.

Dolly realises the only way out of her predicament was to get married. Bert Russell was a good match in many ways and had faith in Dolly’s business sense and abilities, but he was also a womaniser. 

What could a woman do but marry, and once you were married you belonged to your husband’s world and had to turn your back on your own. It wasn’t betrayal. It was the way the world was.

Discovering Bert’s philandering after the birth of their first child, Dolly is furious and humiliated. She thinks to leave Bert but soon realises she couldn’t manage on her own. Instead she keeps the family moving from one successful business venture to another. Then the Great Depression hits and they are forced to return to farming due to financial difficulties.

What she really wanted was what she’d never had: to be a person on her own, free of any obligations, away from the great sticky tangle of family. To float wherever she liked, like those men in the Depression who’d turned their backs on everything and gone on the wallaby.

When her sons enlist at the outbreak of World War II, Dolly’s anger and sense of helplessness drive her on again, leaving Bert on the farm and drifting alone from job to job, and to help her daughter with her children. Eventually Dolly moves into an apartment beside her daughter’s house when she is old. This is how Kate Grenville remembers her grandmother – as a five year old saying ‘no’ when her grandmother asks her if she loved her.

All you could say was, you were born into a world that made it easy for you or made it hard for you, and all you could do was stumble along under the weight of whatever you’d been given to carry. No wonder at the end of it you’re tired, and sad. But glad to have done it all, even the mistakes. Glad to be alive, too. Even if you were only alive enough to watch another day’s light slide along the wall, and wait for the night.

Restless Dolly Maunder is a story about the rage that built in women at a time when they were not allowed to realise their potential or exercise freedoms due to patriarchal limitations imposed on them. The harshness of that life drove them to unhappiness and emotional detachment in order to survive.

Grenville brings the setting alive through her use of imagery in Restless Dolly Maunder, and emotional oppression seeps from the pages. The story is a reminder of how restricted women’s lives were not so very long ago, and a reminder of the importance of maintaining the freedoms gained. Restless Dolly Maunder won the 2024 Women’s Prize for Fiction.