One Life: My Mother's Story

Australian novelist Kate Grenville’s biography One Life: My Mother’s Story (2015) narrates the life of her mother, Nance, who escaped humble origins in rural Australia by training in pharmacy, one of the few professions open to women in the early 20th century. Grenville is best known as the author of Lilian’s Story (1986).

Nance Isobel Russell is born in 1912 to a small-time farmer and his formidable wife. Her family had come to Australia on convict ships. Her great-great-grandfather was transported for stealing timber.

Nance’s father, Bert, struggles to make ends meet and takes his frustrations out on his wife, Dolly. In turn, Dolly treats her children coldly, telling them that they don’t matter to her. Nance remembers her mother dunking her head in the horse trough to stop her crying. In the face of this treatment, Nance and her older brother, Frank, form a close bond.



Dolly sends Nance to leave with a succession of surrogate parents, before finally leaving her to board in a convent school (though the family is not Catholic). She misbehaves, and the nuns accuse her of “sending girls to hell.”

She receives a decent education, however, and begins to recognize herself as intelligent. At high school, she discovers Keats and is encouraged to graduate by a kindly teacher. Just as importantly, she encounters adult women who are university graduates, unmarried, and unapologetic about it.

She leaves school just as the Depression is beginning. Work is hard to come by for everyone, so the idea of a woman embarking on a professional career is downright laughable to most. However, Nance is determined to succeed, so she attends Sydney University to train as a pharmacist, one of the few professions to which women enjoy equal access. Nevertheless, she is one of just six women in a class of 80.



At University, Nance realizes that although she shares the ambitions of women of her generation to marry and have a family, she wants “something else as well.”

Nance graduates and manages to secure a series of jobs in chemists. These jobs are poorly paid, and women are paid half the salary of their male counterparts. She is also treated badly by her male employers, but Nance enjoys the satisfaction of being the provider for her struggling family.

She loses her virginity to one of her employers with whom she begins an affair. Although she loves him, she resists the feeling, knowing that he will never marry her. He offers to take her to Edinburgh, Scotland as his mistress, but she declines, not wanting to end up as “his half-educated pharmacist friend from the colonies.”



Instead, she marries Grenville’s father, Ken Gee, a law student from a well-to-do family. Harboring secret communist sympathies, during the war he serves as a boilermaker’s assistant, leaving Nance to be the principal breadwinner for their young family, despite the absence of childcare options. She runs her own pharmacy for a while and even builds the family home: “Why shouldn’t a woman lay bricks? The world would never change if someone wasn’t prepared to be the first.”

In 1944, Nance learns that her beloved brother, Frank, has died in a Japanese POW camp. She grieves profoundly, becoming dangerously thin and struggling to function. Only the fact that her family cannot get by without her income keeps her going. Her sons also console her by reminding her of their uncle.

In the meantime, the love fades from her marriage. Although she and Ken are friendly and affectionate, there is no passion between them. Nance is determined to stay for the sake of her children, not wanting to repeat the mistakes of her cold and distant mother.



Ken begins to build a career in law, eventually rising to the position of Crown Prosecutor. For the first time in her life, Nance does not have to work to feed her family. She enjoys a decade of upper-middle-class comfort.

She and her husband have been married for 25 years when she learns that Ken is having an affair and that his mistress is pregnant. The marriage ends, and Nance is suddenly left without any of the struggles that have defined her existence.

She returns to her first love: literature. One by one, she conquers the languages of Europe so that she can read Baudelaire and Dante in the original. She teaches English to non-native speakers. Far from being “half-educated,” by the end of her life, Nance is a distinguished woman of culture.



Throughout her life, Nance remains a warm, affectionate, and proud mother. With her will, Nance leaves a letter for her children, in which she says she is “like the Roman matron who said of her children, ‘These are my jewels.’” She also leaves fragments of an uncompleted memoir, the basis for Grenville’s book.