AustLit

'KATE GRENVILLE tells how her grandmother Dolly - the subject of her new book - railed against society’s shackles at the turn of the 20th century Grandmothers are supposed to be cosy creatures, all scones and big warm hugs. Mine wasn’t – she was cranky, frowning, scary. My mother’s stories portrayed Grandma as an unloving bully. “Why did my mother never love me?” Mum would ask, and I had no answers.' (Introduction)   

'Dolly Maunder was born at the end of the nineteenth century, when society’s long-locked doors were finally starting to creak ajar for women. Born into a poor farming family in country New South Wales but clever, energetic and determined, she spent her restless life pushing at those doors.

'Most women like Dolly have more or less disappeared from view, remembered only in a family photo album as a remote figure in impossible clothes, and maybe for a lemon-pudding recipe. Restless Dolly Maunder brings one of them to life as a person we can recognise and whose struggles we can empathise with.

'In this novel, Kate Grenville uses family memories and research to imagine her way into the life of her grandmother. This is the story of a woman born into a world of limits and obstacles who was able—though at a cost—to make a life for herself. Her battles and triumphs helped to open doors for the women who came after.' (Publication summary)

'The greatest influence on Kate Grenville was her mother, whose own passion for storytelling and record keeping is among the award-winning author’s earliest memories. By Kate Holden.'  (Introduction)

'These letters were the starting point for Kate Grenville’s bestselling novel A Room Made of Leaves. They inspired the portrait of her imagined Elizabeth Macarthur: shrewd, subtle, passionate. And they offer a glimpse into the complex inner life of one of our most powerful foremothers. Yet, until now, a general reader could only access a handful of them.

'This book offers an edited selection, with commentary from Grenville, of the many letters Elizabeth Macarthur wrote ‘home’ from colonial Sydney over her long life—letters in which we can hear the voice of a remarkable woman. Circumstances confronted her with huge challenges, but also gave her opportunities unknown to most women of the time. It was a life of tumult, of griefs and joys—all faced with spirit, and recorded in this lively and engaging correspondence.' (Publication summary)

''If there’d been a gun in her hand at that moment she knew she’d have shot them.... She’d been so pleased with little Dolly Russell, the good life she’d got for them all. Thought she had it made, had got her hands at last on the levers of her life.... Now it turned out that all that, being so pleased with herself, was no more real than a puff of smoke.'

'Always Greener is an exquisite portrait of Kate Grenville's complex, conflicted grandmother, who she feared as a child and only in adulthood came to understand. Born in rural Australia, Dolly Russell becomes a successful businessperson, mother and troubled wife. Then came the depression, bankruptcy and World War I. Yet, in a way, those disasters freed her. They allowed her to use her intelligence and ambition to make a space for herself in a man’s world.

'With all the pathos and subtlety that defined Grenville’s Australian classics such as Lilian’s Story and her Booker-shortlisted The Secret River, Always Greener tells the story of a generation of women often forgotten at our own cost.' (Publication summary)

'At first we laughed at ourselves. The way people looked disapprovingly at a bulging shopping bag. The moral agony about whether to take the last tin of kidney beans. The jokes about toilet paper.' (Introduction)

'In writing Elizabeth Macarthur’s imagined tell-all, I wanted to take the image of the devout, demure, compliant and uncomplaining woman and blast it open.'

'Do not believe too quickly…

'What if Elizabeth Macarthur—wife of the notorious John Macarthur, wool baron in early Sydney—had written a shockingly frank secret memoir?

'In her introduction Kate Grenville tells, tongue firmly in cheek, of discovering a long-hidden box containing that memoir. What follows is a playful dance of possibilities between the real and the invented.

'Grenville’s Elizabeth Macarthur is a passionate woman managing her complicated life—marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her own heart, the search for power in a society that gave her none—with spirit, cunning and sly wit.

'Her memoir reveals the dark underbelly of the polite world of Jane Austen. It explodes the stereotype of the women of the past: devoted and docile, accepting of their narrow choices. That was their public face—here’s what one of them really thought.

'At the centre of this book is one of the most toxic issues of our times: the seductive appeal of false stories. Beneath the surface of Elizabeth Macarthur’s life and the violent colonial world she navigated are secrets and lies with the dangerous power to shape reality.

'A Room Made of Leaves is the internationally acclaimed author Kate Grenville’s first novel in almost a decade. It is historical fiction turned inside out, a stunning sleight of hand that gives the past the piercing immediacy of the present.'(Publication summary)

'The first book of Thea Astley’s I read was A Kindness Cup, which was published in 1974. Rereading it in the early 2000s I was awed at how ahead of her time she was. Thirty years beforehand she had known what some of us were only just waking up to: that our own history provides a powerful engine for fiction, and that the voice of fiction can say the unspoken about that history.' (Introduction)

'The proposed changes to copyright have the potential to send Australian writing, in one lifetime, through an entire cycle from bust to boom and back to bust again. Sixty years ago, what Australians got to read was by and large dictated by people on the other side of the world. We were a literary colony. If the Productivity Commission has its way, we’ll be back to that same second-hand status.' (Introduction)

'Nance was a week short of her sixth birthday when she and Frank were roused out of bed in the dark and lifted into the buggy, squashed in with bedding, the cooking pots rattling around in the back, and her mother shouting back towards the house: Goodbye, Rothsay, I hope I never see you again!

'When Kate Grenville’s mother died she left behind many fragments of memoir. These were the starting point for One Life, the story of a woman whose life spanned a century of tumult and change. In many ways Nance’s story echoes that of many mothers and grandmothers, for whom the spectacular shifts of the twentieth century offered a path to new freedoms and choices. In other ways Nance was exceptional. In an era when women were expected to have no ambitions beyond the domestic, she ran successful businesses as a registered pharmacist, laid the bricks for the family home, and discovered her husband’s secret life as a revolutionary.

'One Life is an act of great imaginative sympathy, a daughter’s intimate account of the patterns in her mother’s life. It is a deeply moving homage by one of Australia’s finest writers.' (Publication summary)