It is also one of the earliest - and finest - genuine travel books are written in English by a woman. Her book is arranged as a series of letters to a friend and shows Lucy to have been an indefatigable traveler who was held in respect by local people, both for her equestrian skills and as a markswoman with pistol and rifle. Her reference to the birth of her son Alatau, in the absence of a medical attendant, offers a further indication of her unusually independent capabilities. The book also contains descriptions of meetings with exiled survivors of the 1825 Decembrist uprising then scattered through Siberia, including M. I. Muravyev-Apostol, I. D. Yakushkin, P. I. Falkenberg, the Volkonsky and Trubetskoy families, the Borisov brothers, and the Bestuzhevs - which her husband could not include in his own books owing to the dedication of his second volume to Tsar Alexander II. Lucy's work is of interest and importance to historians of the period. During the years she spent in the home of General Muravyev, Lucy knew personally several of the family and friends of the Decembrists in St Petersburg and Moscow, as well as prominent members of the Russian aristocracy. At the end of her book, she wrote: "I now look back on all those scenes and repeat what we have often said, that willingly would we face ten times more toil and difficulty rather than go down to mother earth without having beheld them". At some point after the publication of her book, Lucy returned to Russia. She eventually came back to London, where she lived in Camden Road, Holloway. In 1881 Lucy was living in London in the home of Benjamin C. Robinson, Sergeant at Law, aged 68. Lucy is listed as a cousin to Benjamin, although in fact she was not closely related. She died of acute bronchitis at 45 Mecklenburgh Square, London, on 13 November 1893. Journalist Nick Fielding later wrote the book "South to the Great Steppe: The Travels of Thomas and Lucy Atkinson in Eastern Kazakhstan, 1847–1852", which described the expedition of the Atkinson family to the Steppe.