A Room made of leaves. Kate Grenville. 2020.

What if Elizabeth MacArthur - wife of the notorious John MacArthur, wool baron in the earliest days of Sydney - had written a shockingly Frank secret memoir? And what if novelist Kate Grenville had miraculously found and published it?

Marriage to a ruthless bully, the impulses of her heart, the search for power in a society that gave women none: this Elizabeth MacArthur manages her complicated life with spirit and passion, cunning and sly wit. Her memoir lets us hear -at last - what one of those seemingly demure women from history might really have thought.