Award winning author Kate Grenville has an ambivalent attitude to biography.  She leverages  this by using its materials, particularly letters, to create an alternative version of events in her novel A Room Made of Leaves, about the colonial figure of Elizabeth Macarthur.

But when she came to editing the original letters for a recently published collection, what else did she discover about Elizabeth and the  ambiguities of correspondence in the eighteenth century, when news took so long to reach the other side of the world?  And when what was left unsaid was sometimes as eloquent as the writing on the page?

Kate’s  thought-provoking conversation  with Caroline Baum sheds light on one of the most fruitful but challenging aspects of biographical research.