Kate Grenville’s Transgressive Narratives

Abstract

Kate Grenville is one of Australia’s foremost women writers whose fictional works have, since the early 1980s, tracked and charted aspects of Australian life. Her novels and short stories refigure literary and national spaces, particularly for women, but also in terms of cross-cultural interactions across the settler-Indigenous divide. Her most well-known and celebrated novels, Lilian’s Story (1985) and the international best-seller, The Secret River (2005) have rightly become classics in the field of Australian literature. This chapter analyses the ways in which Grenville’s narratives have explored the “dark places” of Australian life and have illuminated and teased out the tensions, inequalities and violence lurking below the surface of the “lucky country” and how they problematise the all-too-easily accepted story of white settlement.