User:MCE89/Ada Cambridge

Ada Cambridge
Born	(1844-11-21)21 November 1844 Wiggenhall, Norfolk, England
Died	19 July 1926(1926-07-19) (aged 81) Melbourne, Australia
Burial place	Brighton General Cemetery
Other names	Ada Cross
Occupation	Writer
Spouse	George Frederick Cross
Children	5

Biography

Early life

Ada Cambridge was born in Wiggenhall, Norfolk, on 21 November 1844. Her mother was the daughter of a doctor, while her father was a wealthy farmer. The family moved to the town of Thorpland around 1845 or 1846, where Ada spent her early childhood. The family's financial fortunes began to suffer as a result of her father's neglect of his farm in favour of hunting and horseriding. Sometime during the 1850s, the family moved to the town of Downham Market, where her father became a trader of corn and seeds. In the late 1850s, the family moved to Great Yarmouth, where according to records, her father began to work as a "commercial traveller". While living in Great Yarmouth, at least two of Ada's siblings died within the span of a few months. After their deaths, the family moved to Ely in Cambridgeshire.

While Ada was regarded as a gifted child by her parents, she received a very limited education. She was educated by a series of seven governesses, who were themselves typically poorly educated, and spent a few months at a boarding school before returning due to homesickness. She was nonetheless a voracious reader, and developed an interest in literature at the encouragement of her youngest aunt, who worked as a governess for European royal families.

After moving to Ely, Ada's life became increasingly centred on religion, leading her to consider becoming a nun. At around the age of 17 of 18, she began writing hymns for a church magazine. She published her first volume of hymns, Hymns on the Litany, in 1865, and followed this with a second volume, Hymns on the Holy Communion, in 1866. Her hymns featured a sombre and meditative tone and a conservative theology. She began to appear in biographical dictionaries of hymnwriters, where she was described as a talented and popular writer.

Ada wrote her first works of fiction for a church literary competition at the encouragement of a rector's wife, where she won both first and second prize. The priest who judged the competition encouraged her to continue writing, and she began to contribute poetry and works of fiction to magazines and periodicals. Three of her early short stories have survived—titled "The Two Surplices", "Little Jenny", and "The Vicar's Guest"—all of which are moral tales centred on religious themes and the experiences of the poor.

In 1870 Ada met a curate named George Frederick Cross, and they decided to marry and to move to Australia. After a seven-week engagement, they married on 25 April 1870 in the Holy Trinity Parish Church at Ely Cathedral. On 1 June they sailed for Australia, with plans to return to England soon.

Life in Australia

Upon their arrival in Australia on 19 August 1870, Ada and George spent their first weeks touring Melbourne; Ada later wrote that she was impressed by the standard of life in the colony and by the new public infrastructure that had been established, including the University of Melbourne, the Botanical Gardens, and the new Public Library. On 31 August they left Melbourne and travelled to the country parish of Wangaratta in which George had been appointed curate. They settled in a cottage on the edge of the town. In March of the following year, Ada gave birth to the first of her five children, Arthur Stuart.

Ada became actively involved in the town's social and community life, and helped to raise money for the church. She sometimes accompanied George on trips to the remote parts of his vast district, and learned to shoot to protect their home. In February 1871, Ada published her first literary work written in Australia in The Sydney Mail, a romantic poem titled "From the Battlefield, Good Night". She began to earn an income from her writing that helped to supplement her husband's meagre clergy stipend. 

In January 1872, following George's ordination to the priesthood, they left for his next posting at Yackandandah. His parish spanned more than 100 miles, forcing him to spend much of his time separated from Ada as he travelled to minister in the far reaches of the district. Ada played an active role in the parish, playing the church organ, teaching classes at Sunday School, and conducting the church choir, although her poor health limited her degree of activity. She began to publish more poetry and fiction in newspapers, and made an increasingly substantial contribution to the family's income. In November 1873 Ada gave birth to her second child, a daughter named Edith Constance, who died of whooping cough 10 months later. Her grief at Edith's death led to a crisis of faith and acted as the spark for her lifelong scepticism towards religious authority.

In December 1874, George and Ada moved to the town of Ballan. The family's financial difficulties became increasingly urgent, with George finding himself unable to keep up with the instalments owed on his debts. Ada wrote to The Australasian in December 1874 and offered to write a regular serial, enclosing the first two chapters of her proposed story. The fourteen-episode serial, titled Up the Murray, was published between March and July 1875 and was Ada's first extended work of fiction. The serial is a romance story that follows a young woman who suffers from seizures and hallucinations. She comes to Australia after the death of her parents and eventually marries a wealthy man, after struggling with the question of whether she is motivated by money or by love. The success of the serial allowed Ada and George to be welcomed into the colony's literary and intellectual circles. She followed the serial with a volume of romantic and religious poetry, The Manor House and Other Poems, also published in 1875.

In April 1876, while Ada was nearing the birth of her third child, her four-year-old son died of scarlet fever. She gave birth to her third child, Vera Lyon, two weeks later on 26 April. That year, she published another serial, My Guardian, in Cassell's Family Magazine, which would also be published as a book two years later. The story follows a young woman who reluctantly marries a man and immediately falls into an illness. After her husband dies, she is left free to marry the man that she truly loved. In 1877, Ada experienced a carriage accident while travelling between Ballan and Ballarat, leaving her with permanent disabilities.

In July 1877 Ada and George moved to Coleraine following the establishment of a new Diocese of Ballarat. She gave birth to her fourth child, Hugh Cambridge, on 14 August 1878. In 1879, the family attempted to raise cattle and farm the land to supplement George's clergy stipend, which had been reduced from 300 to 250 pounds, but eventually abandoned the plan and instead began to rent out their land. That year she also wrote two new serial romance novels: In Two Years' Time for The Australasian, and The Captain's Charge for The Sydney Mail. She followed this with another romance serial, Dinah, published in The Australasian between December 1879 and February 1880.

On 3 January 1880 Ada gave birth to another son named Kenneth Stuart. She suffered a breakdown and became housebound, before also suffering a near-fatal miscarriage. She went away to recover. During her period of recovery, she produced a large volume of writing. Her next serial, A Mere Chance, was published in The Australasian and then printed in three volumes in 1882.  As her depression deepened in 1881, she began to write increasingly melancholy poetry, including one poem in which she expressed her support for euthanasia. She also published two more serials, Missed in the Crowd for The Australasian and A Girl's Ideal for The Age, between late 1881 and early 1882, as well as a serial titled Across the Grain in December 1882.

In 1883 Ada published one of her most popular works, The Three Miss Kings. It was initially published as a serial in The Australasian, and then published as a book in 1892. The novel contains fairytale motifs and is staged against the backdrop of the Melbourne International Exhibition. It follows three newly orphaned young women who consider what to do with their newly found independence, before eventually settling down and finding husbands. George continued to take long trips to visit the remote parts of his parish, leaving Ada alone for long periods with her young children. She began to publish many poems expressing her sadness and her crisis of faith.

In January 1884, the family moved to Sandhurst (now Bendigo), a town of 50,000 people that was one of the colony's major centres. That year, Ada wrote four short stories, and also began to rework some of her earlier writing to maintain her rate of publication and support the family financially. In March 1885 the family moved again to the goldfields town of Beechworth, where they would stay for the next nine years. Ada began to travel frequently to Melbourne, which was connected to Beechworth by train, and began to send her two surviving sons to Beechworth Grammar School.

While George's stipend had finally been increased, Ada continued writing, contributing both short stories and serials to newspapers. She published her next serial, A Little Minx, in The Sydney Mail in 1885, which would eventually be expanded and published in novel form in 1893. The novel centres on divorce, and criticises both feminists—who are shown to be more concerned with theoretical debates than women's welfare—and the judgemental attitudes of society towards women. 

In March 1886 Ada was admitted to hospital due to complications associated with her earlier miscarriage, with fears that she would not survive the admission. She remained in hospital for three months before leaving against her doctor's advice; the admission, which cost 200 pounds, had severely cut into the family's finances.

She published another volume of poetry, Unspoken Thoughts, anonymously in London the following year. The volume features a number of poems centred on loss and grief, as well as Ada's views on religion and marriage. The poems explored controversial topics, including the nature of God, the hypocrisy of organised religion, and the topics of marital vows, prostitution, euthanasia, and suicide. The volume was positively received but did not sell well, with only 150 of the 500 copies sold. Ada withdrew the volume from publication for reasons that remain uncertain; she would later refuse to allow the more controversial poems from the volume to be reprinted.

Ada's next serial, A Woman's Friendship, appeared in The Age between August and October 1889.. The novel depicts a group of women who form a society to discuss women's rights, but end up torn apart by jealousy after pursuing a man. They eventually return to their husbands and repair their friendship. Ada's fiction began to feature more depictions of the "New Woman", who she suggested would only be made truly happy through marriage. Her stories also began to feature greater criticism of the hypocrisy and snobbery of the clergy. While she maintained her belief in social reform and her concern for the plight of the poor, she also began to move politically to the right, becoming increasingly concerned by trade unionism and government overreach.

By the early 1890s, Ada was a well-known and popular writer. She wrote two more romance novels: Not All in Vain, first serialised in the Australasian and then published as a book in 1892, and A Little Minx, a repurposing of some of her earlier serials, published in 1893. Both novels were well reviewed. The family's finances suffered as a result of Victoria's 1890s depression, and were particularly strained by their son Hugh's school fees at Geelong Grammar. Ada signed contracts with publishers in New York and London for her next novel, A Marriage Ceremony.

In October 1893 the family moved to Williamstown in Melbourne. A Marriage Ceremony, which was based on a serial that Ada had published a decade earlier in The Australasian, was published in 1894 and received positive reviews. She contracted again with publishers in New York and London for her next novel, Fidelis, which was based on her earlier work A Marked Man and was released in 1896 to positive reviews. Unlike Ada's other fiction, Fidelis was written from a male perspective and explored the challenges of finding a suitable wife. She repeated this perspective in her next novel, A Humble Enterprise, which was also based on a previous serial she had written for The Australasian. Ada used the novel to present a moral lesson to young women, illustrating that men looked for domestic virtue when seeking a wife, and that "frivolous" matters like fashion would not help them to find a suitable husband.

Ada also began to write a number of short stories for English periodicals. In 1897 she published a collection of short stories titled At Midnight and Other Stories, which included both Gothic fiction and romance stories. Her reputation as a writer continued to grow; in 1896 she was the subject of a chapter in the book Australian Writers by the critic Desmond Byre, and in 1898 she was identified as one of Australia's two leading "poetesses" in the book The Development of Australian Literature.

In 1898 Ada published the novel Materfamilias. The novel is narrated by a grandmother named Mary, who gives a biased recounting of her life while remaining unaware of how her manipulative behaviour and self-delusion have evidently affected those around her. According to Ada's biographers, contemporary reviewers entirely misread the novel and failed to appreciate Ada's use of irony. Tate regards Materfamilias as one of Ada's best works, and write that it demonstrates "how the domestic novel can be elevated to an art form". She followed this with two more novels, Path and Goal and The Devastators, in 1900 and 1901.

In 1902, Ada became the first president of a newly formed society of women writers, the Melbourne Writers' Club. She also contracted with a publisher to write her memoir, Thirty Years in Australia. But she would also suffer personal tragedies; in 1902 her son Hugh died of typhoid fever at the age of 24, and in 1904 her son-in-law committed suicide as a result of his financial ruin, leaving Ada and George to support their daughter and infant grandson. She increased the pace of her writing, and by 1907 had published four new novels: Sisters, A Platonic Friendship, A Happy Marriage, and The Eternal Feminine. 

In 1908, Ada and George returned to England for six months, where they visited George's extended family and sites from Ada's childhood. George had been forced to return to deal with the legal matters surrounding a family inheritance, and they had decided that in light of her poor health, Ada would accompany him. While in England, Ada began to write essays for the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review. In these essays, she wrote about ageing and her religious journey. She also wrote about the women's rights movement, characterising herself as a supporter of women's rights while suggesting that modern women had undermined their own cause and allowed themselves to be treated as inferior by acting immaturely. 

Later life and death

Following George's retirement in 1910, the couple moved to England in 1912 and settled in Cambridge. There, she published two books—The Retrospect, a reminiscence on her early life in England, in 1912, and a novel titled The Making of Rachel Rowe in 1914 — as well as a volume of poetry, The Hand in the Dark, in 1913. Ada became homesick and longed to return to Australia to be with her children. After George's death in February 1917, Ada returned to Australia in August.

Cambridge's grave at Brighton General Cemetery

Ada had become too frail to write, but continued attempting to make money independently without being forced to rely on others. In 1919 she offered a volume of short stories to Angus & Robertson, but the publisher declined to proceed with the work. In 1921 Ada suffered a stroke, and as she became increasingly lonely and ill, she developed a correspondence with the publisher George Robertson. She published her last essay, "Nightfall", in 1922, in which she described the "secret humiliations" of old age and wrote of her fear of becoming dependent on others' charity. Her final published work was likely a poem that she published for Anzac Day in the magazine Woman's World in April 1923.

While the serialised republication of her memoir Thirty Years in Australia had put her in a slightly more secure financial position, Ada remained concerned about her finances and pursued the republication of her other works. She moved into a nursing home in 1924, and then into a private hospital. She suffered another stroke in 1926, leaving her blind and paralysed. She died in Elsternwick on 19 July 1926 at the age of 82 and was buried at Brighton Cemetery.

Themes and style

Cambridge's novels follow a similar formula. Most centre on the romance between a hero and a heroine, and end in marriage. Along the way, the narrative creates barriers to their marriage, such as misunderstandings, changes of heart, and moral dilemmas, which are then overcome. Cambridge's heroines were generally attractive, morally upstanding, upper-middle class young women with "ladylike" qualities. Her novels often explore the challenges of finding a suitable spouse, and the expectations and pressures placed on both men and women. Many of her heroines are forced to work or live independently, before ultimately finding happiness through marriage.

Bielby notes, however, that Cambridge's writing frequently features ironic techniques that pose a challenge to interpreting her work. He suggests that she may have at times deliberately played with her traditional narrative structure to subvert readers expectations. He also observes that there is variation in Cambridge's romances, from very simple narrative structures, to more complex plots featuring a greater cast of characters and less predictable endings. Cambridge's use of irony and her subversion of traditional societal norms regarding marriage became more common in her later writing.

Cambridge's fiction typically presented marriage as something that should be chosen freely. However, her romantic plots suggested that "true love" was not an essential component of a successful marriage, and that even those who do not truly love their husbands can become dutiful and happy wives. She also suggested that young women might only find the capacity for true love as they matured, after initially marrying for reasons of money or obligation. Some of her later works also criticised the desire of modern women to pursue their own passions at the cost of their duty, and suggested that true happiness would only be found through marriage.

Legacy

Ada Cambridge was a popular and well-regarded writer during her lifetime and into the 1930s. Cambridge wrote for an audience largely composed of women, and was one of the only Australian writers of her era to depict emotional life and romantic relationships. She was described as the leading female novelist of her era, and was called the "doyen of women writers in Australia" upon her death. Her fiction was widely popular among Australian, English, and American readers. However, after her death, her fiction began to be regarded more critically. She was dismissed as an Anglophile interested only in trivial and womanly affairs. Her biographer Audrey Tate summarises her reputation as being that of a "frail clergyman's wife writing romantic fiction of dubious value". They attribute this shift in her reputation to the emergence of an Australian literary genre from the 1890s onwards, which centred around tales of the bush and male heroism. Cambridge was often discussed alongside the writers Tasma and Rosa Praed, with all three dismissed as the authors of trivial and low-quality romances.

In the 1970s a resurgence of interest in women's writing saw a re-evaluation of Cambridge's work. One of the catalysts for this re-evaluation of Cambridge's writing was a 1972 article by Jill Roe, which sparked interest from other feminist scholars. Biographers and scholars have begun to regard Cambridge's fiction as featuring more complexity, radicalism, and subversion than had previously been appreciated. Her biographer Audrey Tate notes her use of irony and experimentation, as well as the anti-establishment sentiment and liberal humanist politics that feature in much of her later work.

Selected works

Novels

• The Two Surplices (1865)
• My Guardian: A Story of the Fen Country (1874)
• Up the Murray (1875)
• In Two Years Time (1879)
• Dinah (1880)
• A Mere Chance (1880)
• Missed in the Crowd (1882)
• A Girl's Ideal (1882)
• Across the Grain (1882)
• The Three Miss Kings (1883)
• A Marriage Ceremony (1884)
• A Little Minx (1885)
• Against the Rules (1886)
• A Black Sheep (1889)
• A Woman's Friendship (1889) (Serialised in the Age, 1889; first published in book form in 1988)
• A Marked Man (1890)
• Not All in Vain (1891)
• Fidelis (1895)
• A Humble Enterprise (1896)
• Materfamilias (1898)
• Path and Goal (1900)
• The Devastators (1901)
• Sisters (1904)
• A Platonic Friendship (1905)
• A Happy Marriage (1906)
• The Eternal Feminine (1907)
• The Making of Rachel Rowe (1914)

Poetry collections

• Hymns on the Litany (1865)
• Hymns on the Holy Communion (1866)
• Echoes (1869)
• The Manor House and Other Poems (1875)
• Unspoken Thoughts (1887)
• The Hand in the Dark and Other Poems (1913)

Short story collections

• The Vicar's Guest: A Tale (1869)
• At Midnight and Other Stories (1897)

Children's fiction

• Little Jenny (1867)

Autobiography

• Thirty Years in Australia (1903)
• The Retrospect (1912)

References

Works cited

Books

• Bradstock, Margaret; Wakeling, Louise (1991). Rattling the Orthodoxies: A Life of Ada Cambridge. Ringwood: Penguin Books. ISBN 9780140129984.
• Tate, Audrey (1991). Ada Cambridge: Her Life and Work, 1844–1926. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. ISBN 0522844103.
• Beilby, Raymond; Hadgraft, Cecil (1979). Ada Cambridge, Tasma, and Rosa Praed. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195505093.

Journal articles

• Bradstock, Margaret; Wakeling, Louise (1990). "Ada Cambridge and the First Thirty Years". Australian Literary Studies. 14 (3): 387–390. doi:10.20314/als.69dbe602b3.
• Bradstock, Margaret (1989). "Unspoken Thoughts: A Reassessment of Ada Cambridge". Australian Literary Studies. 14 (1): 51–65. doi:10.20314/als.ec483f0bd2.
• Barton, Patricia (1987). "Reopening the Case of Ada Cambridge". Australian Literary Studies. 13 (2): 201–209. doi:10.20314/als.b6cf42a7f5.
• Roe, Jill (1972). "'The Scope of Women's Thought is Necessarily Less' : The Case of Ada Cambridge". Australian Literary Studies. 5 (4): 388–403. doi:10.20314/als.8daa052bf8.

Biographical entries

• Roe, Jill (1969). "Ada Cambridge". In Pike, Douglas (ed.). Australian Dictionary of Biography. Vol. 3. Carlton: Melbourne University Press. ISBN 0522839096. Retrieved 1 December 2025.
• Wilde, William H.; Hooton, Joy; Andrews, Barry, eds. (1994). "Cambridge, Ada". The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature (2 ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195533811.
• Dingley, Robert (23 September 2004). "Cambridge [married name Cross], Ada". The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/55556.