Mapping modernity in "Marvellous Melbourne": Ada Cambridge's A woman's friendship

Ada Cambridge (1844-1926) published her novel A Woman's Friendship in the Melbourne Age in weekly instalments from August to October 1889. 1 Cambridge had established herself as a fiction writer in the 1870s and achieved great acclaim with the publication of A Marked Man in 1890. Her geme was romantic fiction and critics generally deem her themes to be narrow; "there is really only one-love (or, in a vulgar sense, romance). The actors are women, and their desire or fate or accident is to marry" (ACT, 12). If this is the case, A Woman's Friendship is not one of her customary tales.