Description

Ada Cambridge (1844-1926), later known as Ada Cross, was an English-born Australian writer. While she gained recognition as Australia's first woman poet of note, her longer term reputation rests on her novels. Overall she wrote more than twenty-five works of fiction, three volumes of poetry and two autobiographical works. Many of her novels were serialised in Australian newspapers, and were never published in book form. According to Barton, her early works 'contain the seeds of her lifelong insistence on and pursuit of physical, spiritual and moral integrity as well as the interweaving of poetry and prose which was to typify her writing career'. In 1875 her first novel Up the Murray appeared in the Australasian but was not published separately, and it was not until 1890 with the publication of A Marked Man that her fame as a writer was established. Her other works include The Manor House and Other Poems (1875), My Guardian (1877), Unspoken Thoughts (1887), A Marked Man (1890), At Midnight and Other Stories (1897) and The Hand in the Dark and Other Poems (1913).