Cirrus@Austlit

'Restless Dolly Maunder follows the life trajectory of Kate Grenville’s grandmother, a novelisation mostly spanning a time now outside living memory and therefore in a field of imagined possibilities. The past can be a playground for the ideas and thoughts that exercise a writer in the present, like this novel’s attempt to understand women’s place in the society of the late 19 th and early 20th centuries. Grenville does this through imagining the entirety of her grandmother’s life and thereby, perhaps, attempting to uncover the impact of this person on subsequent generations. The novel is a creative exploration of the shifting and slippery family foundations of our existence that time so efficiently obscures. It is a recapturing and linking of three generations of women, each a product of their time and experience but questing at the ends of their lives to work out the mysterious ties of family, familial love and the deep impact they have on each other’s lives.' 

(Introduction)