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 and short stories in her teenage years. In 1870, she married a clergyman and moved to Australia, where she and her husband lived in a series of parishes in country Victoria until 1893. To supplement the family's income, Cambridge began publishing serials, short stories, and poetry in Australian newspapers.
By 1893, when the family moved to Williamstown in Melbourne, Cambridge had begun publishing her novels internationally and had established herself as one of the country's leading authors. She wrote around 25 novels, 2 memoirs, and 5 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 examined society's treatment 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, placing it at odds with the emerging nationalist school of bush-centred Australian literature. However, the 1970s saw a resurgence of interest in Cambridge's writing from feminist scholars. Literary scholars have since argued that her writing features more narrative complexity and radicalism than had previously been appreciated, including frequent critiques of organised religion and restrictive social structures.
