Ada Cambridge

Ada Cambridge was a Victorian novelist and diarist. The wife of a vicar, she followed her husband around various postings in country Victoria before ending up at the Holy Trinity parish in Williamstown. Her best known work 'Thirty Years in Australia' details her busy life as a vicars wife and the many hardships she endured. By the 1940s she was largely forgotten.

Altogether, Ada produced twenty-one novels, three volumes of poetry, two autobiographies and contributed to such journals as the Atlantic Monthly and the Australian Ladies' Annual. On the whole Ada Cambridge wrote about the section of colonial society most closely associated with England and its styles and standards. Within the limits of a conventional romantic plot and the setting of Toorak mansions or pastoral homesteads, the newly-arrived English men or women of her earlier serials met and won their marriage partners, while her heroines escaped the allurements of vulgar wealth to be restored to men who best represented the fashionable ideals of gentle breeding.