Ada Cambridge, who would become one of colonial Australia's most prolific and quietly subversive literary voices, was born on 21 November 1844 at St Germans, Norfolk, England. She was the second child of Thomasine and Henry Cambridge, a gentleman farmer of comfortable means. The Norfolk countryside, with its flat, expansive skies and ancient, weathered churches, would seep into her imagination and later resurface in…
“During all my inland life at home and twenty-three years in the Australian bush, however happy I may have been, there was always that one thing wanting—the near neighbourhood, the salt breath of the sea.”
Neighbourhood:
Nature Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Despair, Longing
Anna Lætitia Barbauld, born Anna Aikin on 20 June 1743 and dead on 9 March 1825, was one of the most accomplished, influential, and later most unjustly neglected writers of the British Romantic era. Poet, essayist, editor, critic, educational reformer, author for children, and public intellectual, she wrote across forms that later literary history too often separated into “major” and “minor” kinds. In her own lifetim…
“The cultivation of the imagination is the great object of education.”
Neighbourhood:
Augustan Poets, Political Poets, Romantic Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Longing, Spirituality, Sorrow
