Kate Grenville - Style and Subject Matter

Style and Subject Matter

Grenville's early fiction presented characters trying to free themselves from social and gender stereotypes. Bearded Ladies is a collection of short stories about women trying to free themselves from the gender stereotypes of their society: metaphorically they are the "bearded ladies" of the title.

Lilian's Story, set in the early twentieth century, takes as its subject a woman who rejects her middle-class background and the conventional future that's expected of her. Instead she chooses to live as a street person, making a living by offering recitations from Shakespeare. At the end of her life she declares joyously : "Drive on, George. I am ready for whatever comes next."

Joan Makes History is a satirical re-writing of Australia's history, foregrounding the women rather than the men. Joan is an Everywoman character who in various guises lives through all the iconic moments of Australia's past. She "makes history" both by simply living her life, and by (re)making history by writing it.

Dreamhouse is a black comedy about a marriage on the rocks. It explores themes of both men and women freeing themselves from stereotypes to accept their true selves. Both partners in the marriage are attracted to their own sex: the wife is prepared to acknowledge that and act on it while the husband refuses to.

The Idea of Perfection is about people haunted by the impossible ideal of perfection. The two main characters are both middle-aged and frumpish, and consider themselves unlovably flawed. The journey they make is to recognise that to be "imperfect" is simply to be human, and carries its own power. As the epigraph from da Vinci asserts : "An arch is two weaknesses that together make a strength".

The Secret River is set in early nineteenth century Australia and is based on the story of one of Grenville's convict ancestors, a London boatman transported for theft. She takes that story as a means of exploring a wider theme: the dark legacy of colonialism, especially its impact on Australia's Aboriginal peoples. The title comes from the anthropologist WEH Stanner, who wrote about a "secret river of blood flowing through Australia's history" : the story of white Australia's relationship with the Aboriginal people.

The Lieutenant is the story of one of the very earliest moments of black-white relationship in Australia, at the time of first settlement in 1788. Based on a historical source - the Gadigal-language notebooks of Lieutenant William Dawes - the novel tells the story of a unique friendship. In learning the Gadigal language from a young girl, Dawes wrote down word-for-word parts of their conversations. Grenville has used these fragments as the basis for a novel exploring how it might be possible for two people to reach across the gulfs of language and culture that separate them, and arrive at a relationship of mutual warmth and respect. She has described it as a "mirror-image" of "The Secret River".

Sarah Thornhill is a sequel to The Secret River. It tells the story of one of the children of the main character in the earlier book. Sarah Thornhill grows up knowing nothing of the dark secret in her family's past, and when she has to confront it, the direction of her life and her thinking is changed. It's a story about secrets and lies, and how to deal with a dark legacy from the past. Grenville has said that the book is set in the nineteenth century, but is as much about the ugly secrets in Australian history that her own generation inherited.

These three books form a loose trilogy - "The Colonial Trilogy" - about the first three generations of white settlement in Australia, and what that shared black/white history means for contemporary Australians. The themes of the three books reach beyond Australia: all are widely read in other countries where colonialism has left a problematic legacy.

Grenville frequently does extensive research for her novels, often using historical or other sources as the starting-point for the work of the imagination. She says of her books that they are "sometimes inspired by historical events, but they are imaginative constructs, not an attempt to write history".