Ada Cambridge was one of Australia's best-known women writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her literary career began during her early womanhood when she published two collections of hymns and three exemplary tales in Christian journals, as well as pious verse. She was also beginning to write the more secular narrative poetry that surfaced later. Once in Australia, to which she moved at the age of twenty-five, Ada Cambridge published short sketches and poems in the Australasian and the Sydney Mail. Her first significant work, however, was the serial "Up the Murray" (Australasian, 27 March 17July 1875), a short Anglo-Australian novel that set the pattern for many of her works to come—reflecting both the older, established world of rural England and the world of Australia. Some twenty years of serial writing in Australia followed. Newspapers were the main vehicle for publishing locally written novels at the time and thus the quickest way to achieve recognition. Many of Cambridge's serials were quickly republished as novels in England, and a number were also taken up by Australian publishers. Once Cambridge had begun to use the literary agent A. P. Watt, a further ten novels were published between 1895 and 1914 by five different English publishing houses. While Cambridge's works during the years up to the turn of the century were not her most innovative romantic novels, they were a move toward experimentation with form and a more philosophical cast of mind. Cambridge increasingly chose to subvert her own endings,