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
In the grand tapestry of Victorian literature, where convention often stifled authentic expression, Mary Montgomerie, Lady Currie (née Lamb, 24 February 1843 – 13 October 1905), known by the literary pseudonym Violet Fane, was an English poet, writer, and later an ambassadress who dared to weave threads of passion, heartbreak, and feminine desire into her verse. Her life, spanning over six decades of the nineteenth c…
Neighbourhood:
Decadent Poets, Victorian Poets, Women Poets
Emotional landscape: Sorrow, Longing, Despair