A Room Made of Leaves by Kate Grenville. Jacket image by Lisla/Shutterstock. Text Publishing, Melbourne, July 2020.
Reviewed by Frank McKone
Each of the three novels, Hamnet, Truganini and A Room Made of Leaves, respectively by Maggie O'Farrell, Cassandra Pybus and Kate Grenville, focusses our attention on a woman – significant in history but unknown to us as a real person.
In each case her “disappearance” is because of a man in her life who shines in the limelight of history. Agnes, or Anne, was the wife of William Shakespeare; Truganini was the guide assisting George Augustus Robinson; Elizabeth was the wife of John Macarthur.
We appreciate Shakespeare for his playwriting; Robinson for trying to
save Tasmania’s original people, according to his own lights; and
Macarthur for establishing Australia’s wool industry.
Each of the
three women authors starts from the premise that these men lived in
highly personal relationships with these women. Without coming to know
those lives as lived by the women, are we seeing only one side of the
history we are taught and have come to accept as sufficient? Might not
the women’s stories, experienced by us imaginatively from within, reveal
another view of history?
The answer by each author in her own way, is Yes – indeed!
Myths
grow on men in history like lichen on ancient rocks; women of all ages
have to live in a different moving reality. These works are novels,
drawing on the authors’ knowledge as women; and their historical
research – though remarkably extensive in each case – has to be
presented as if it is fiction, since their characters’ actual personal
records have disappeared.
It is in the creation of the characters
of Agnes, Truganini and Elizabeth that we come to understand them as
people first. Then, in their roles as wife or guide, we see through the
men’s auras, scraping away the patina, to see a new kind of truth.
I reviewed Truganini
first (8 May 2020), fascinated by this First Nations woman of such
self-determination, strength of character and cross-cultural diplomatic
sensibility. I knew of Hamnet only as William Shakespeare’s son,
who died aged 11. I had no preconception of his mother who made her
life her own, including in her mid-twenties marrying an 18-year-old
Latin tutor. Nor how she and her often away from home husband came to
terms with Hamnet’s death. (Reviewed here 19 June 2020)
And now,
just published in July, as if by magic, I’m led to believe that
Elizabeth née Veale had been born and brought up in Devonshire, not far
from my own favourite haunts as a child, though pigs happened to be more
in my purview than sheep. And so I was under way, with a touch of Jane
Austen, into the life of this young woman needing to marry into some
kind of regular income.
And what a woman, who, with all her wits
about her when she has reached about three score years and twenty,
living in Australia, just like me now, writes up her life and leaves her
story hidden in Elizabeth Farm, Parramatta. I don’t have her wits, but
I’m sure that Kate Grenville does. The “transcriber and editor”, as
Grenville describes herself, writes of Elizabeth Macarthur: “In these
private papers, written near the end of her life, she steps out from
behind the bland documents that were her public face. They’re a series
of hot outpourings, pellets of memory lit by passionate feeling. With
sometimes shocking frankness, they invite us to see right through into
her heart.”
Some readers may find it hard to accept Grenville’s
subterfuge. But, in effect, this apparently advertorial “quote” lays
out her intention in this novel. I believe she achieves her aim most
powerfully. Not only do we experience what surely must have been the
reality of Elizabeth Macarthur’s life from a child taught so much by her
sheep-farming grandfather to a woman without whom the development of
the Australian Merino wool industry would never have happened, but we
come to understand, as her character grows, the awful contrast between
the emotional ineptness of a man like John Macarthur and the emotional
maturity and subtlety needed to be learnt by a woman in the position of
such a man’s wife.
It is in this understanding that Grenville’s
work matches the creation of the characters of Agnes by O’Farrell and of
Truganini by Pybus. William Shakespeare and George Augustus Robinson
are quite different men from John Macarthur and each other, of course.
Each of the three authors cleverly reveal the nature of those particular
men, through each woman’s eyes, but each of the women have the same
basic issue to deal with.
As, surely, all women do. Agnes,
Truganini and Elizabeth are wonderful models of real people in history –
women from whom men can learn, as I hope I have myself. Each of them
are different, too. From Agnes I think of her originality of approach;
from Truganini her vivacity in youth and dignity in old age; from
Elizabeth her growing self-awareness.
From all three it is the
importance of women’s self-determination that stands out. Disappearing
from history should be no woman’s fate.
In this sense, all three books are political – A Room Made of Leaves
perhaps more overtly, in Grenville’s characterisation of Elizabeth
Macarthur who seems to have been so much more deliberately written out
of the record, in favour of the scoundrel, John Macarthur. Many
surprises await you in this novel approach to what really happened in
the penal colony, according to this "truly incredible and strangely
little-known story: How Elizabeth Macarthur's long-lost secret memoirs
were discovered."
© Frank McKone, Canberra
