Acclaimed historian Alan Atkinson author of the award-winning Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm pieces together the life of Penelope Lucas and the pivotal role she played in building the Macarthur empire. While she is known as the family governess, Atkinson reveals that Penelope was primarily an accountant whose bookkeeping work made an important difference to the Macarthurs' success.

Penelope Lucas came to Australia in 1805, in her thirties, unmarried she was the first well-educated woman to travel independently from Europe to Australia and looking forward to living on inherited income. While Elizabeth Macarthur was unsurprisingly upset when her husband, John, arrived back from three years in England with a woman she had never heard of, Penelope went on to live with the Macarthurs for over thirty years and became close friends with Elizabeth.

In this revelatory work, Atkinson brings together fifty years of scholarship as he explores the gender dynamics of the Macarthur household and the life of a single woman of means in Georgian England and early colonial Sydney.

'A prodigious feat of historical imagination.' Matthew Allen

'Exquisitely written and meticulously researched.' Alecia Simmonds

'As delicately observational as it is learned...Atkinson writes with the lightest touch.' Alison Bashford

'Well-written and absorbing history.' Canberra Weekly

'While little material evidence remains of Lucas' life, Alan Atkinson conjures out of this silence a tantalising portrait of her life in London and later with the Macarthurs at Elizabeth Farm in Parramatta, extrapolating from the ideas in the air at the time on philosophy, the power of reading and imagination, women's potential to create a fascinating evocation of the forces that shaped her inner world.' Fiona Capp, Sydney Morning Herald / The Age