Restless Dolly Maunder: Unpicking the life of a difficult woman

Kate thought for a moment before answering. "No," she said matter-of-factly, and toddled off.

Thinking back to that moment today, she regrets her undisguised bluntness, the understandable - but still confronting - honesty of a child. Her grandmother, Dolly Maunder, was a difficult person, who, later in Grenville's life, she knew only through her own mother's stories.

In her new book, Restless Dolly Maunder, Grenville has imagined her way into the life of the woman whose magnificently literary name adorns the cover. The real Dolly Maunder was a woman who, born at the end of the 19th century, was trapped in a world filled with locked doors, behind which opportunities for women were beckoning.

And she was frustrated. Her frustration and rage made her all the more determined to make her own way in the world, even while mired in the typical life of women of her era.

Born into a poor farming family, her reality was back-breaking housework, marriage, more housework and child-rearing. Forbidden from studying to be a teacher, she married a local, family-approved boy and steadily, with her husband, built a business empire. The pair started a shop, then acquired a boarding house, a pub, a couple of hotels, all through hard work.

She wasn't, it must be said, a nice woman. Grenville knows this through her own mother, who had a strained relationship with Dolly.

"The version of my grandmother that I got was actually a very negative one from my mother," she says. "And so, as I was trying to write down his story, I thought, well, we all have nasty qualities, but we're all a mixture ... of being nice and being incredibly horrible people. So can I modify my mother's story?

"I knew her as a rather intimidating woman. But I think we would now say that she had been damaged, and very hurt psychologically, by being born a woman at the time she was, basically, and wanting a bit more."

Restless Dolly Maunder is a novel, rather than a biography; women like her didn't tend to leave comprehensive records of their lives. But through her own extensive research she found she had enough to work with to imagine her journey through life.

She had also written a memoir about her own mother, One Life, published in 2015, based on fragments of memoir she found after she died in 2002.

"Mum told me a lot of stories about her own mother, which were not particularly flattering, but it meant that by the time I'd finished writing my mother's story, I knew a lot about her mother," she says.

"I was already seeing that my mother's version was just that - a version. And we don't understand our parents particularly well, I don't think - we don't necessarily think of them as real people. So I think the thing is, it has been gestating all that time ... and it's a story that really interests me, that generation of women is a bit left out. We know about the sort of Jane Austen generation, and we know about the more recent war generation, the women who were adults in the 1950s. But in the 19th century, those women? There's a bit of a gap there."

And yet it was a time of dramatic change for women, especially in Australia. Dolly was 20 when she was finally able to vote, and she was a young girl when compulsory education was introduced.

"Dolly's generation really was out on the leading edge of the wave of change that has resulted in the world that women now live in," Grenville says.

In learning as much as she could about the real Dolly Maunder, she found herself warming to the woman she always remembered as the cold, distant figure of her childhood.

"I thought, here is a woman doing her best under really difficult circumstances."

She says the strained relationship between Dolly and her daughter - Grenville's mother - was understandable, in a way. And she thinks there may have been some regret there, even in asking her own granddaughter if she loved her.

"I really do wish that I'd said something a bit less blunt," she says.