Excellent story of one woman’s feisty survival of ghastly enforced marriage to awful man in 19th century resulting in emigration to NSW. Elizabeth, also unsurprisingly, seems to have been far more involved in successful sheep breeding than has been acknowledged in the traditional histories. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

She was a remarkable woman, to have managed the gigantic enterprise of the family business at a time when women were expected to be helpless and ignorant and stay at home with the children. A Room Made of Leaves is the explosive biographical novel by Booker-shortlisted Australian author Kate Grenville and boy was it worth the almost decade long wait.Now, in the vast landscapes of an unknown continent, Elizabeth has to discover a strength she never imagined, and passions she could never express. Despite my unease, I enjoyed the opportunity to view colonial settlement through a different perspective. Kate Grenville has now written several books set in the early years of the British colonisation of New South Wales and while this one treads slightly different territory to its predecessors, there is necessarily some cross over of events and personnel. Forced to travel with him to New South Wales, she arrives to find Sydney Town a brutal, dusty, hungry place of makeshift shelters, failing crops, scheming and rumours. An ingenious tapestry of history and invention, A Room Made of Leaves is a novel of womanhood, motherhood, secrets, lies, obsession, transformation and the loss of innocence.

Forced to travel with him to New South Wales, she arrives to find Sydney Town a brutal, dusty, hungry. Australian history, like most histories, is a bit light-on when it comes to women, because they left so little behind.I listened to the audiobook version narrated by Valerie Bader and was initially daunted when I saw it had 131 chapters.

Grenville invites the reader to reflect on the complex relationship between truth and falsehood, history and fiction…[A] stunning literary achievement.I really believe that Elizabeth was the main partner in developing the merino empire, especially knowing her family background in England, and also the fact that her husband spent so many years away from the farm. I drew on as many primary sources as I could find: the parish records of Bridgerule in Devon, archives in the State Library of NSW, Governors’ correspondence, and contemporary accounts of early Sydney.