Restless Dolly Maunder

I greatly enjoyed this aptly entitled novel. It proceeds in linear fashion, not quite cradle to grave, but very close. It focuses on Dolly, who’s born to a poor Australian farming family in 1880, telling her story into the 1950s. Dolly is a bright little girl and dreams of becoming a teacher. “Over my dead body” is her father’s harsh response. Educating children beyond the absolute basics is simply not part of the culture. After finishing at the one-room rural school, a girl is expected to stay on the farm and help with domestic chores until she’s married off. Dolly chafes against this fate, but recognizing that the lives of most spinsters are pitiable, she resigns herself to it.

Dolly does experience some romance as a young woman. She falls in love with one Catholic boy and then another, but such relationships can go nowhere: Dolly’s a “proddy”, Church of England, and the denominations don’t mix. One of the poorest and grubbiest of Dolly’s schoolmates, Bert Russell, ends up becoming a hired man on Dolly’s father’s farm. She has an aversion to him. Her mother, on the other hand, becomes fixated on the young man and determines he’ll be the one to save her restless, difficult daughter from spinsterhood. Mrs. Maunder keeps a terrible secret about Bert from Dolly, which the young woman discovers only after her marriage and the two have settled on a farm. Although Dolly typically looks ahead, this secret, her mother’s betrayal, and her own feelings of humiliation hurt and haunt her through the years.

There is no love lost between Bert and Dolly, but both have been formed by difficult circumstances, and they stay together, producing three children. Dolly has considerable drive. She’s the one who gets her family off a farm that fails to produce for several years in a row, due to the merciless elements: drought, wind, rain, and hail.

Grenville tells of the family’s adventures moving to first to the outskirts of Sydney to run a shop and then to a series of small towns where they run pubs, hotels, and a beach house. In spite of her ongoing problems with Bert, Dolly acknowledges that the two of them make good business partners, largely because her husband, for all his faults, respects her intelligence. Motherhood, however, is a tremendous challenge for her. She is not fulfilled by it and is often harsh with her children. She wishes she could be different, and is not without self-awareness. Nevertheless, she cannot take herself in hand. She’s quick to anger, dictatorial, and controlling. The kids are regularly uprooted, as Dolly’s restlessness inevitably kicks in. Everything changes, of course, with the Wall Street Crash of 1929, the effects of which ripple across the world. Strangely, it is only when all the Russell family has worked for is lost that Dolly becomes most free.

We tend to forget just how restricted women’s lives were, not even a hundred years ago. This simply told story reminds us. As I was reading, I was aware of echoes of Dolly’s problems in my grandmother’s, mother’s, and my own life. Some of the attitudes addressed here are with us yet. The world still isn’t as tolerant as it might be of women who choose unconventional paths.

While there’s a certain repetitiveness to Dolly and Bert’s many relocations, I still enjoyed the book and recommend it.