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Elizabeth Macarthur’s Letters, edited by Kate Grenville review – a fascinating dialogue
Grenville follows up her novel about the Australian settler with a collection of her actual letters, revealing a witty but elusive subject
Kate Grenville has been unsettling conventional narratives of colonial Australia since the publication of her 2005 novel The Secret River, which drew on her own family history. So far, this has been a fictional project: in her novels, Grenville asks what role stories have to play in the way we understand history and what new perspectives on the truth might be offered by fiction.
Her work has unnerved some historians, who have been uncomfortable with the idea that she might claim a status for her novels equal to historical truth. This misreading of her project is one that Grenville seemed to poke fun at in her most recent novel, A Room Made of Leaves, with the conceit that the novel was really a secret manuscript written by the early Australian settler Elizabeth Macarthur, then hidden for years in an attic. Grenville’s fictional Elizabeth revealed her feelings about her irascible husband, the colonist John Macarthur, and her struggle to make a life in the new colony.
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