“My intellectual life was never so well-fed and fortified.” — Ada Cambridge | V2Melody

“My intellectual life was never so well-fed and fortified.”

A concise tribute to surroundings and companionship that nourished her mind · Memoir, Thirty Years in Australia (1903)

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About Ada Cambridge

Ada Cambridge

21 November 1844–19 July 1926

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…

More by Ada Cambridge

Poems by Ada Cambridge

More remarks by Ada Cambridge

“It is a sad reflection—the waste of valuable things in life, the persistent superfluity of the valueless.”

Lamenting how life can squander what matters while preserving what does not · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“Careful, delicate, faithful work, no matter on what article expended, was the note of excellence, and the longer I live the more I respect and love it.”

Honouring craftsmanship through patience, fidelity and attention to detail · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)

“The notion of making it a pleasure as well as a discipline, of breathing into its dry bones any breath of knowledgeable life, seemed not to occur to anybody.”

Arguing implicitly for learning that is alive, pleasurable and intellectually meaningful · Memoir, The Retrospect (1912)