Ada Cambridge was one of Australia's best-known women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her literary career began during her early womanhood when she published two collections of hymns and three exemplary tales in Christian journals, as well as pious verse. She was also beginning to write the more secular narrative poetry that surfaced later. Once in Australia, to which she moved at the age of twenty-five, Ada Cambridge published short sketches and poems in the Australasian and the Sydney Mail. Her first significant work, however, was the serial "Up the Murray" (Australasian, 27 March - 17 July 1875), a short Anglo-Australian novel that set the pattern for many of her works to come--reflecting both the older, established world of rural England and the world of Australia. Some twenty years of serial writing in Australia followed. Newspapers were the main vehicle for publishing locally written novels at the...