Abstract

In this essay we indicate some of the ways in which Kate Grenville’s fiction is designed to suggest how women are oppressed by language and violence and how they might escape complicity in that oppression. Grenville’s work is not feminist theory. Indeed, she has said that she writes to explore interesting hypotheses ‘in a shamelessly subjective way — the way of intuition and empathy’, rather than on the basis of theoretical assumptions and she argues that the novel allows innovative approaches to hypothetical questions. Yet her writing does have a high degree of coherence and consistency, and she does raise and explore issues of current interest in feminist theory. In this essay we explore some of these issues, focussing on Grenville’s four novels.

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