The delightful aspect of historian Atkinson’s new book is that a reader will learn not just about the subject of the book, but aspects of life at the time, including the gender politics of Georgian England. He admits that Penelope Lucas’s life was not well documented, first in England, and then as part of John and Elizabeth Macarthur’s household in colonial Sydney.
He takes his title from the belief that she had been forced to live in ‘a house of blue glass’. It stood for the invisible barrier that encircled women’s lives in Lucas’s day, and for centuries before and after. The glass ceiling is often quoted as stopping women’s upward achievements, but the blue glass house of Atkinson’s imagination stopped movement in every direction.
By delving into Lucas’s antecedents, Atkinson presents an account of her family from the late 1600s to Penelope’s birth in 1769 in London and death in Australia in 1836.
How her parents and grandparents lived and worked in London; the foresight shown by a grandmother who refused to let her second husband take over her inheritance, as was common at the time; and even the complicated financial dealings in Chancery after her father died intestate are all part of the historical detail surrounding Lucas.
She came to Australia as governess for a Macarthur daughter, but soon became the bookkeeper for the Macarthur enterprises, some more successful than others, using double-entry bookkeeping. In later years she was known to have supported various enterprises in Sydney.
Her life, as a single woman of means in Georgian England and colonial Sydney, admired by John Macarthur and a firm friend of Elizabeth Macarthur, is told by Atkinson tying history to anthropology, political economy, Indigenous knowledge systems and even psychology, and comes after 50 years of studying the Macarthur family.
Reviewed by Jennifer Somerville
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Atkinson has been writing Australian history since the 1970s, and he has a lifelong interest in family circumstances and relationships. He has written or edited a dozen books, including ‘The Europeans in Australia’, in three volumes, the third of which won the Victorian Prize for Literature, and Elizabeth and John, which won the NSW Premier’s Award for Australian history. He is an honorary professor and Doctor of Letters with the University of Sydney.
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