Ada Cambridge was a prolific and well-known author of fiction (more than twenty novels), poetry (three volumes), and autobiography (two volumes) in the final four decades of the nineteenth century and the first few years of the twentieth. Married for most of her writing career, she published under her birth name. Virtually all of her books appeared in London, and her more popular works also in the USA, even though her fiction was first serialized in her adopted homeland of Australia. She is remembered now as one of the earliest Australian women poets of note, for her achievements in fiction, and for her frank account of the trials of life in the colony.