While the life and times of Elizabeth Macarthur (or the character ‘Elizabeth Macarthur’) are doubtless central to A Room Made of Leaves, of no less concern is the issue of the rewriting of history as fiction, which is, after all, as Ian Watt (in his ground-breaking work The Rise of the Novel, [1957]) among others has urged, where the novel began back in the mid eighteenth century, a mere few decades before Sydney was settled. At least one reader of Kate Grenville’s new novel felt so ignorant about the historical Elizabeth Macarthur that he thought he ought do some homework in order to hold forth about fiction versus fact. In her Acknowledgements, Grenville salutes Michelle Scott Tucker’s ‘excellent book’ Elizabeth Macarthur: A life at the edge of the world (2018), which, she predicts, ‘will remain the standard biography of that remarkable woman for a long time to come’.

Scott Tucker at her book’s end describes Macarthur as ‘an ordinary English country [Devon] woman who fell in love with a difficult man and, as a result of his decision to sail to New South Wales, she lived an extraordinarily interesting life’. On the evidence of Scott Tucker’s and Grenville’s books, not merely the life but the woman was extraordinary. Indeed, Scott Tucker elsewhere describes Macarthur as the ‘woman who established the Australian wool industry (although her husband received all the credit)’. Grenville’s title may recall Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929), wherein it is argued that in order for a woman to write fiction she must have two things: a room of her own (with key and lock) and enough money to support herself. Elizabeth Macarthur, for much of her life, enjoyed the latter but never the former.

The eponymous room made of leaves is in fact the harbourside retreat of botanist and astronomer William Dawes (not to be confused with that other eminent early Australian figure, Rufus Dawes), who also features in Ashley Hay’s wonderful Sydney novel The Body in the Clouds (2010). Mr Dawes and Mrs Macarthur scramble down between the harbourside bushes, coming to ‘a halt in a space enclosed on three sides by greenery. The fourth, facing the harbour, was obscured but not closed in by more branches, forming a private space: a room made of leaves.’ Mrs Macarthur thinks of

the pleasure of having a small private place where you could simply be who you were. A moi. Mine alone, my own. … I felt my skin go out to meet him, felt my blood warmed by his nearness. The habit of being Mrs Macarthur – proper, courteous, reserved – had grown around me like a long-worn garment, every stitch familiar. Yet here it was, unravelling to show me what lay beneath.

Mrs Macarthur, and we readers, have fallen into something idyllic, perhaps even paradisal. Her room made of leaves may be traced back through Huck Finn’s island (1884) at least to Andrew Marvell’s ‘The Garden’.

What wondrous life in this I lead!
Ripe apples drop about my head;
The luscious clusters of the vine
Upon my mouth do crush their wine;
The nectarine, and curious peach,
Into my hands themselves do reach;
Stumbling on melons, as I pass,
Ensnared with flowers, I fall on grass
…
Two paradises ’twere in one
To live in paradise alone.

But not for Kate Grenville’s ‘Mrs Macarthur’ or ‘Mr Dawes’, it would seem. They would appear to delight in what Henry James and others referred to as ‘criminal conversation’. It is not fanciful here to imagine historians mounting upon their high horses. Neither Ashley Hay nor Michelle Scott Turner considers Elizabeth and William committing adultery, though the fictional and ‘paranoid’ ‘John Macarthur’ does fantasise about the possibility of his wife’s infidelity. It all transpired or did not two hundred years ago, so no one can sue Kate Grenville (unlike Ellen Wren, who sued Frank Hardy for his depiction of her as the adulterous Nellie West in Power Without Glory [1950]). But a question niggles. Is it ethical for a novelist to do what Grenville does and impute such details into the private lives of historical personages?

Many of the delights of A Room Made of Leaves fall in the realm of realism. The rigours of childbirth, the facts of menstruation, Sapphic temptations between girls sharing a bed, Elizabeth’s judgement upon her husband: ‘rash, impulsive, changeable, self-deceiving, cold, unreachable, self-regarding … There was worse. My husband was someone whose judgement was dangerously unbalanced.’ On the other hand, would ‘Mrs Macarthur’ realistically have been capable of the following observation? ‘If the surface could hold, like a brimming glass of water kept together by its own density [my italics] perhaps Mr Macarthur would at least leave the idea of a court martial behind, and our fortunes might prosper.’ At least she did not say ‘meniscus’. A minor quibble, doubtless.

Mrs Macarthur and her fellow new-chums doubtless felt as cut adrift from everything familiar as did Marvell’s ‘rational amphibia’:

But now the salmon-fishers moist
Their leathern boats begin to hoist;
And, like Antipodes in shoes,
Have shod their heads in their canoes.

In colonial America, confronted with a comparable dislocation, military bands played ‘The World Turn’d Upside-Down’. We can but wonder what was played at those gubernatorial balls at Government House to which the Macarthurs were invited.