Author: Carol Liston

Publisher:

Published: 1988

Total Pages: 128

ISBN-13: 9780949753342

The biography of Sarah Wentworth by Carol Liston reveals her to be a remarkably practical head of the family who devoted much energy to mundane but essential matters such as stock raising and the productivity of their estates. In addition to bearing ten children with Wentworth, Sarah oversaw the operation of their Vaucluse Estate and other properties; and her influence ruled over the family for their forty-eight years together. Sarah's thorough, sensible management no doubt allowed her husband to pursue his political career without the energy-sapping distractions of domestic life. Sarah's talents were formed in part by her upbringing in a rustic colony that was only seventeen years old when she was born. Her father, Frances Cox, was a blacksmith who operated a forge near Sydney's Circular Quay (adjacent to today's Macquarie Place) with her mother, Frances Morton. Both parents were former convicts who had been transported for theft. Her family never prospered and her father operated his forge until he was over seventy years old. The liaison with William Charles Wentworth allowed Sarah to escape a cruel economic fate as Sarah had been apprenticed to a milliner when she was in her teens. By the time Wentworth and Sarah had taken up residence at Vaucluse House, they had two children born out of wedlock, eight more were to be born at Vaucluse and their last surviving child appeared in 1848. Family letters reveal the family to be close-knit, solicitous and clearly devoted to their father.