Restless Dolly Maunder is just that, restless. She is born in the 1880's in New South Wales, Australia. Her family is poor, and she has five older sisters and brothers, and another baby is on the way. They are a farming family , and their father is an angry, sometimes violent man, her mom unhappy and grim most of the time. Dolly does well in school, but but when she tells her parents that she wants to become a teacher, her father says " over my dead body". Dolly continues to work on the farm, and loathes the repetitive hard work, but sees no way out except to eventually marry.

A woman cannot sign for a loan, purchase a piece of property and has few options. Eventually at her parents urging , she settles for a man named Bert Russell. The marriage is no especially happy, but the couple have three children. Dolly finds she is not much for mothering, and quickly grows restless with their farm. With Dolly's urging and planning, the family moves around frequently, purchasing and running shops, pubs, hotels and a beach house.

p6 " Girls were of no account, you learned early on. Good enough to make bread and milk the cow, and later on you'd look after children . But no woman was ever going to a part of the real business of this world ." Dolly rails against this for the rest of her life. We often forget how difficult life was for women in days gone by, and this story illustrates that well. I recall my maternal grandmother wanting to purchase a house during WW11 , and having to get her father to sign the purchase for her, as my grandfather was at war. My paternal grandmother hid her marriage for several years so that she could continue to work, as married working women were not allowed to keep jobs.

At times I felt that story was a bit repetitive as the family moved from place to place, but overall a very thought provoking read. ( )

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 and tells 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 her mother 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 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 their 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, she 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 the novel 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 still with us. 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 moves, I still enjoyed the book and recommend it. ( )

I loved this book as it so clearly depicted the reality of life for these women in the early 1900's. A recommended read and one to remind us of the physical hardships our forbears endured and their grit and determination to build a better more fulfilling life for future generations. ( )