By contrast, Joan Pickett carefully kept the weekly letters she wrote home to her father while travelling and working in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific, a working holiday that ended after his death and her return home to Manchester. For Joan, the eight years of travel were marked forever as a special time, a fount of memories and stories continually retold in the present.

Their stories, along with those of Dorothy Wright and Phyllis Cave, are sensitively told in this book by Alistair Thomson. Of the four women featured here, three returned to Britain after a period of living in Australia, drawn by the strength of family ties or, in Phyllis Cave’s case, reluctantly forced by her husband’s decision.

Their experiences are testament to the complexity of migration. In their patterns and repetitions, but also in their divergences, a rich social history emerges of women’s lives ‘across two countries’: framed by domesticity, family relationships, the difficulties of adjusting to new circumstances, and the deep pleasure of discovering new opportunities.

There is a challenge in this. How does a male academic historian represent the life stories of four ordinary women, on their own terms, without resigning his own critical or analytic faculties, without reproducing a narrative of breathtaking banality, without being cloyingly sentimental, and without being patronising? It is to Thomson’s credit that he steers clear of the potential pitfalls, though there are moments when it is a close-run thing.

Those moments occur most often in the early pages of this book. In the Introduction especially, Thomson seems to be overcompensating. The snippets he offers from his own diary, recording his enthusiastic response to meeting his participants and their families, have the tone of an anxious host at an ill-assorted party, who worries that his guests won’t appreciate each other’s good qualities. Thomson’s creditable desire to present these humdrum domestic narratives as personal dramas of deep significance to their participants occasionally grates. This is not helped by the fact that the first story he has to tell unfolds with minimal tension. Quiet success stories are pleasing, but hardly the stuff of drama. Committed as I am to the idea that social and personal experience belong to history as firmly as wars and pestilence, I wondered if here I had found the limits to my generous arc of historical significance.

But they get you in. The stories become more intricate, the contrasts as well as the continuities more striking, and the small dramas more involving. We are introduced to Dorothy Wright’s moving letters home, splintered by the unacknowledged, indeed unrealised, depression that followed the birth of her second child; then to Joan Pickett’s exuberant delight in her travels, so abruptly undercut by the death of her deeply loved father; and at last to Phyllis Cave’s searing experience of having the flourishing career she established in Australia wrenched from her, first by a child’s illness and then by her less successful husband’s abrupt decision to take his family back to England – leaving behind their daughter, who refused to leave Sydney. Gwen Good’s life, too, it is increasingly apparent, had its subtle tensions. As the book unfolds, one’s criteria of significance adapts to the intricacies of the history it contains.

The essence of the book – and the ultimate test of its success – is the collaboration between Thomson and the four participants in his project, billed as co-authors on the title page. Thomson’s reflections on the process and pitfalls of collaboration are sensitive and illuminating. Yet his awareness cannot entirely overcome the uncomfortable inequalities of this collaboration. Though all four women have displayed an autobiographical impulse at some time, it is unlikely that they could have published their stories on their own, without the historian’s synthesis and analytic, explanatory voice to lend them new significance. If Thomson’s tone sometimes seems patronising, it is because authorial patronage is inescapably what we are witnessing here. He shepherds the four women’s stories into the world; they have little option but to accept his terms. In fact, they did exert considerable control over their stories, correcting detail, placing embargoes on particular information, reshaping, and rewording. But their editorial work is rendered invisible in the seamless presentation of the final version, whereas Thomson’s editorial interventions are always apparent, precisely because he makes them explicit. Paradoxically, his gestures of abdication draw attention to his presence. But he addresses the difficulties with awareness, integrity, and care. By the end, I was fully persuaded of the value of his approach.

My initial concern that these stories were too humdrum to count as history likewise evaporated as I discovered the source of that anxiety. The problem for me, I realised, was that these are stories from my mother’s generation, stories from a world that belongs within my own memory of childhood, which I have not yet learned to regard as history. What would I not give for a record so intricate, and so intimate, of women’s migration in the nineteenth century? I found myself showing pictures and reading out snippets to my own children, to convey a glimpse of a world that I had known but they never will – that for them is irreducibly history, with all the enchantment of distance that this implies. The brilliance of this book is that it catches these stories just at the moment when they are ceasing to be familiar, representing them for a posterity for whom they will illuminate an unknown past.

The title of this book may suggest that the author is claiming a capacity to move us, his readers, with his stories of lives in motion. But Thomson explains it better. These are stories that ‘move’ both the narrator and the audience in each of their many tellings, yes; but, more importantly, the stories themselves are still mobile. They are living stories, which shift and change as they are made and remade to suit the needs and circumstances of the present moment. Memory is not fixed, any more than history is. Perhaps we can see this most clearly in Gwen Good’s rediscovery of a significant past. The audio letters she consigned to a jumble sale were picked up by a man who recognised their historical value, and sent to the Battye Library in Perth. There, some years later, Thomson listened to them, then contacted Good and began to encourage her to reflect on the fading memories they contained. Through correspondence and conversation, she began to bring her half-forgotten stories back into memory, and into history. I predict that Moving Stories will serve as a prompt for many readers to reconsider their own lives, to note the specificity of events, experiences, and opinions, and, by simultaneous acts of distancing and recovery, understand how they, too, connect to the rich tapestry of the past.