The name “Penelope Lucas” will ring a bell with very few. Even among aficionados of early colonial New South Wales the tinkling might be very faint. Hitherto, Penelope Lucas (1769–1836) has been remembered, if at all, as the governess who spent her adult life with the graziers John and Elizabeth Macarthur and their three daughters, and for several years as the inhabitant of Hambledon Cottage, one of the oldest residential buildings in Parramatta – today a house museum.
It was her obscurity that made me interested in Penelope Lucas. My latest book, The House of Blue Glass: A Life of Penelope Lucas, was released by NewSouth Publishing in March 2026. I wrote it partly as a coda to my book on the Macarthurs, Elizabeth and John: The Macarthurs of Elizabeth Farm (NewSouth, 2022), about the couple who are remembered today for their work in establishing the Australian wool industry. In making my way through the dynamics of the Macarthurs’ marriage I was led to wonder how much Penelope Lucas might represent in some sense the emotional heart of their household. I could see that she was in effect their business partner. What more was she?
More fundamentally, how far was it possible to know and understand any woman largely silent in surviving records and therefore almost entirely forgotten?
Tracing Penelope Lucas
Despite the sheer quantity of Macarthur family papers and despite the fact that she always lived with the family, sharing the children’s beds and overseeing the finances of household and business, Penelope Lucas is not an easily approachable figure for the historian. I wondered about her silence, as an aspect of her personality but also as an aspect of the position she occupied, not just as a woman but as an unmarried woman, a woman largely enclosed by the circumstances of domestic life. After all, at that time marriage was usually the only means by which a woman could make any sort of respectable mark on the world, and Penelope Lucas never married.
On the other hand, she had several things going for her. She was well educated, though I have mostly had to guess at her intellectual interests. She also had a fortune of her own, inherited from her father. Finally, as I’ve discovered, she was a trained accountant – trained, at least to the extent of understanding double-entry book-keeping, the method of accountancy which in her day was being taken up at all the higher echelons of financial life. With these advantages, Penelope Lucas was able to make her unmarried state into a positive blessing – a kind of emancipation.
Only two of Penelope’s letters survive and there is nothing like a diary. I’ve therefore created this story largely from financial records, some surviving in court cases but most of them among the Macarthur family papers. I have worked out ways of converting pounds, shillings and pence to degrees of emotion and human connection, and as a tentative means of understanding the woman from within. Success has been very partial, but I think it’s justified the effort. Money is a plastic resource. It has its moral and spiritual dimensions. The life of Penelope Lucas illustrates that fact.
Penelope Lucas: her world, life & mind
I’ve wanted the world to know Penelope Lucas, but even more I’ve been interested in what Penelope Lucas understood of the world. Her mind, its dimensions and its impact, is really the main subject of the book.
But what is mind? There are new theories about the definition of mind, in which humanities and social sciences research overlap with clinical research in neuroscience. In this respect two writers have helped me a lot. Andy Clark, a philosopher now at the University of Sussex, has pioneered the idea of the “extended mind”. See his book, Supersizing the Mind: Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension (2011). Lambros Malafouris, a Cambridge archaeologist, has shown how that notion can affect our understanding of the past. His book, How Things Shape the Mind: A Theory of Material Engagement (2016), is particularly particularly exciting for that reason.
Clark argues against traditional notions of mind – the cartesian or brainbound model, as he calls it. The mind, he says, is not to be understood as coterminous with the brain, as a self-contained executive agent sending orders to the physical body and so to the world beyond. Rather, the mind is a parcel of brain, body and immediate circumstances, continuously interactive through each lifetime. Malafouris brings to that idea an archaeologist’s skill in understanding human-made things.
How to draw such insights into a lively story? Maybe I would have written about Penelope Lucas in roughly the same way without reading such books, but they have helped enormously in giving The House of Blue Glass a deeper sense of direction. And they obviously surface here and there, especially in my chapter about Penelope Lucas and her needlework. By needle, by pen or in any other way, I’ve wanted to imagine her mind making its own detailed imprint on the material world.
In pursuing the view from within I’ve also been puzzled by notions of self. Recall Alice in Wonderland, who famously told the Mock Turtle, “It’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then”. Seen from within, notions of self are tenuous. I am 79. Was I the same person 70 years ago? It doesn’t feel like it. What about Penelope?
Imagined from within, self is held together mainly by memory, which frequently falters. A biography can offer a fixed and cogent portrait, but that was not what I wanted. I wanted the truth about herself as imagined by Penelope Lucas and, as with Alice, that truth must have been evanescent. The book outlines probabilities, nothing more, as to the way the mind of this one woman absorbed and manipulated her world – her habitat, her umwelt – two centuries before our own.
