Author: Rosalie Ham
Molly: A Prequel to the Dressmaker, as the name of the book suggests, is a story of Molly, Tilly’s mother. In The Dressmaker, Tilly Dunnage comes home to live with her mother, Molly, who has a mental health condition and does not recognize her. Local people call her ‘Mad Molly’. Tilly makes couture dresses for local women and suffers from the prejudice that has driven her away as a child. In this book, we learn about Molly and her life, though it ends when she arrives at Dungatar. We do not learn why Molly got sick, but the story presented in this book speaks for itself due to the suffering Molly endures.
Molly’s story is set in Melbourne in 1914, before the events of The Dressmaker, and follows Molly’s life as a young and ambitious girl. She is also a Suffragette, campaigns for better working conditions for women, and is trying to develop a corsetry business. In The Dressmaker, Molly is just described as misunderstood, eccentric, unstable, and dismissed by the town. The Dressmaker does not explain what happened to Molly and how her life was before being sick, so this novel gives a nice touch explaining how poverty and misery follow people, and how hard it is to dig yourself out from poverty and prejudice. Molly’s story also explains why Tilly could never be accepted in Dungatar, no matter what she did. At the same time, Molly could also be a standalone novel, as well.
Molly’s story is a story of suffrage, both in a personal and political sense. She works in a textile factory where the manufacturing manager abuses her and other workers. She has original designs for corsetry that would make women feel less constrained, and she tries to make them for upper-class women who embrace her designs and pay her; however, not much comes out of it, and despite acknowledgment of her designs in an opera play by a famous Australian opera singer, Dame Lily Pert, who wears her costume at her big return, nothing really happens for Molly. The other upper-class woman uses her and makes her believe that once she inherits the factory from her father, Molly will be a designer. Truth to be known, she did not have much choice because women were, at the time, not allowed to inherit property despite being heiresses in their parents’ will, as was the case this time, because, as the novel says, there was always a cousin contesting the will. So, when Alathea Pocknall takes the money from the investor, it is not like she had a choice but to grab the money and leave for America. However, she could have given Molly an envelope of money, not just what she owed her for her designs, which the book describes as ‘only just’. So, nothing extra for the help because it was indeed Molly who introduced her to the investor. However, this moment and the fact that Molly helped her also determined Molly’s life because one of the investors, who actually wanted to defraud Alathea, whom she figured out, then blames and hates Molly and follows her to Dungatar. We know from The Dressmaker what happens to Evan Pettyman, and that he is Tilly’s father; however, this book shows how it came to be that both of them are in the same town, and why Molly and Tilly never fit in.
This novel has a different historical and emotional angle than The Dressmaker because this is a story showing how women’s reputations are made, how independence is punished, and how clothing can become both a tool of restriction and a means of self-definition. Sociologically, Molly can be read as a novel about the making of a reputation. We already know from The Dressmaker that Molly is known as ‘Mad Molly’, so this prequel invites us to understand how that happened and how such a label is produced. The Molly prequel shows that Molly’s marginalization in The Dressmaker is not just a personal tragedy but the result of a social judgment, gendered surveillance, and the women’s punishments for not conforming to societal roles. Molly’s work in corsetry is particularly relevant because it tells a story of factory exploitation, workers’ rights abuse, the labor movement, and explains why, even today, women’s organizations often stand with the marginalized regardless of whether they are women or ethnic or gender minorities.
From a Bourdieusian perspective, Molly is concerned with the social conditions under which women are granted or denied legitimacy because Molly has skills, intellect, ambition, and political awareness, but these do not automatically translate to recognition. The novel, therefore, shows that reputation is not simply a reflection of who a person is; it is produced within a social field where gender, class, respectability, and symbolic power determine whose version of events is believed.
An outstanding book. There is also a third book, The Dressmaker’s Secret, which likely happens after The Dressmaker, and is now on my to-read list. I could not recommend this amazing book series enough!
Thank you for reading!