Ada Cambridge

Ada Cambridge (21 November 1844 – 19 July 1926) was an English-born Australian writer. Born in Norfolk into a middle-class farming family, she began writing hymns in her teenage years and then began contributing poetry and short stories to church magazines. In 1870 she married a clergyman and moved to Australia, where she and her husband resided in a series of rural parishes between 1870 and 1893. To supplement the family's income, she began publishing serial novels, short stories, and poetry in Australian newspapers.

By 1893 when the family moved to Williamstown in Melbourne, Ada had begun to publish her novels internationally and had established herself as one of the country's leading authors. She wrote around 25 novels, two memoirs, and five volumes of hymns and poetry during her lifetime. She also contributed essays to international magazines and periodicals, including the Atlantic Monthly and the North American Review. Her writing largely consisted of romance novels, in which she often explored the status of women and the social norms surrounding marriage.

While Cambridge was a popular and well-regarded writer during her lifetime, her literary reputation suffered in the years following her death. Her writing was widely dismissed as consisting of shallow and formulaic romances rooted in English traditions, which placed it at odds with the emerging "bush nationalist" genre of Australian literature. However, interest in her work saw a resurgence from feminist scholars during the 1970s. Scholars have since argued that her writing features more complexity and radicalism than had previously been appreciated, including frequent critiques of organised religion and social structures, as well as the use of irony and satire.