Lucy Atkinson Author & Editor

Lucy Atkinson was born in 1817 in Sunderland, Co Durham, but was brought up in East London. In her early 20s she sailed to St Petersburg in Russia to work as a governess for a noble Russian family. In 1846 in the same city she met architect-turned-artist Thomas Witlam Atkinson and not long after married him and set off on horseback into Siberia and Central Asia. For the next six years Thomas, Lucy and their newly-born son Alatau travelled thousands of miles through some of the most desolate, remote and inhospitable regions of the Russian Empire, only returning to England in 1858. Thomas died in 1861 and Lucy, at the insistence of publisher John Murray, decided to write down her experiences which were published in 1863 as Recollections of Tartar Steppes and their Inhabitants. She died in London in November 1893.