All these middle-class novels are instructive and prescriptive, their authors confidently separating sheep from goats, since the essence of middle and upper class membership was its exclusion of the rest of the world. Certain values were enshrined, moral in essence but social in their manifestations. Thus Cambridge’s three heroines, despite their initially ambiguous social position, are always gentlewomen by virtue of innate qualities which have to do with good breeding, and acquired characteristics which are due to an excellent education.

Their rags to riches story is Cinderella’s. This ubiquitous romance theme can probably be called a feminist archetype – it certainly has an irresistible attractiveness. But the nineteenth century Cinderella is more of a feminist herself than her predecessors, or at least her authors endow her with more power. Invariably, she not only wins her prince but inherits wealth before her marriage (Evelina and Jane Eyre are typical examples), so that even if her property becomes her husband’s upon marriage, she at least enters that marriage with more economic equality.

The Three Miss Kings has a mystery plot as well as its romance one, and these Australian girls are finally discovered to be heirs to an aristocratic name, an ancient English property and a vast fortune. How does a novel with such a plot lay claim to excellence, let alone originality?

The colonial context is crucial, not cringingly denigrated by Cambridge, but used to articulate her own intensely felt ambivalence. Not only did colonial society have to look to ‘home’ to define gentility, it also adopted what Miriam Dixon calls domestic feminism, a distancing from shameful social origins through an over-reaction of ultra-respectability. Thus the Miss Kings’ worth is finally measured not only by their conquering the highest levels of Melbourne’s society, but England’s, too. This comes about not simply because they become heiresses to a name as well as a fortune, but because they possess a rare excellence of character, they are unusually cultured and accomplished and they possess all the virtues of domestic usefulness as well. In private they are exemplary housewives; in public, paragons of all the social virtues.

Nevertheless, if they are perfect ladies, they also lively, natural Australian girls, deeply attached to Australia after enjoying an idyllic childhood in unusual isolation in exquisitely beautiful surroundings (in what seems to be Queenscliff). Like Rosa Praed, Cambridge makes a claim for Australia’s natural advantages in forming character, and their Australian heroines contradict the ‘bush hoyden’ stereotype.

Cambridge’s novel is enlivened by the presence of its author and her unusual personality and relatively unconventional ideas. Her personal duties as a minister’s wife probably influenced her insistence that wealthy members of society should undertake active and practical philanthropy. The ‘fairygodmother’ of The Three Miss Kings, the wealthy Mrs Duff-Scott who introduces the girls into Melbourne society, gives up her passion for collecting fine china to take up care of the destitute. In this she is influenced by the FreeThinking hero who is to marry the eldest Miss King (boasting the wonderful Romance name of Kingscote Yelverton). Through him, Cambridge voices a thoroughly liberal view of Christianity which dismisses orthodoxy as less important than the exercise of the Christian virtues, particularly charity, and resolves evolutionary problems through an allegorical reading of the Bible.

The 1880 International Exhibition in Melbourne is used, as is the Melbourne Cup, to demonstrate that the Australian colonies possessed a city and a social élite as wealthy and sophisticated as many in the Old World. Yet the novel cannot resolve the ambivalence felt by the colonial upper class about where ‘home’ was really to be found, any more than Ada Cambridge was able to resolve it in her own life. For those wealthy enough to move freely between the two worlds of England and Australia, ‘home’ was always the place one had just left.

Cambridge’s New World Cinderellas have endings made happier, perhaps, by their having legitimate claims to both worlds, and the wealth to move between them. Thus the novel uses the conventions of romance to capture a particular and persisting historical dilemma which was by no means resolved by the Act of Federation.

Audrey Tate’s Introduction is informative and lively, and has some interesting opinions on the author, the constraints under which she wrote and her relative unorthodoxy as a thinker.

Leshia Harford’s novel The Invaluable Mystery, written between 1921 and 1924, was discovered almost accidentally quite recently, despite knowledge of its existence and earlier unsuccessful searches for it. Harford’s considerable political commitment – after completing a law degree she deliberately chose factory work and domestic service, became a member of the Industrial Workers of the World and opposed conscription – is presumed to be the reason for her novel’s earlier rejection by publishers. Richard Nile and Robert Darby have written an Introduction which passionately claims the suppression of Harford’s novel is proof of a hidden political agenda behind Australian publishing practices. How much radical political fiction challenging the status quo was suppressed between William Lane’s 1890’s Working Man’s Paradise and Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Working Bullocks (1926), they ask, and how might this hidden material alter our present conceptions of Australian literary history?

These are questions well worth asking, and they certainly make a powerful case for more Australian literary research to be undertaken. But my reading of the novel differs in emphasis from theirs. There are two strands to The Invaluable Mystery; one is the injustice of the racist treatment of German nationals interned during World War I, the other explores the transition from girlhood to a yet-to-be-achieved womanhood of the heroine, Sally Putman, whose father and brother are interned. Since Sally’s is the novel’s presiding consciousness, it is the latter which seems most important, and the deliberately naïve style of much of the novel conveys the simplicities of both an untutored sensibility and a life of willingly embraced domestic confinement.

Certainly, the novel contains a number of radical challenges – to the bourgeois novel and its literary assumptions; to an unjust and repressive political status quo; to Australian racism and xenophobia; and to the overwhelmingly masculinist ethos of the time. Most of these challenges, however, are implicit rather than explicitly articulated. The novel gives attention to the poor, the oppressed – in a supposedly just and egalitarian society – and to women’s lives. It is the antithesis of a literary romance, yet there emerges an implacable insistence on the romance of realism, not wish-fulfilment. The real world is rendered with a simplicity and detail which insist we pause to take in what is being so carefully, although apparently artlessly, described.

From a feminist perspective, the novel provides an amazingly quiet and understated, though devastatingly effective, picture of the male appropriation of female lives. Sally never questions her subsidiary role, lack of power and constant domestic work in the household and small shop, and she is not even a wife but simply a daughter and sister. Needless to say, for this real-life Cinderella there is no fairy godmother, nor marriage to a prince. The domestic details of cleaning, cooking, washing, feeding the chooks, etc., are given the same importance and proportion of the novel’s attentions as they require and have in Sally’s world. In the tradition of the best domestic novels (and Catherine Spence’s work comes to mind again, particularly Clara Morison), this is giving dignity to women’s labour, and for me that is the novel’s most radical statement.

The Invaluable Mystery is an intriguing, slightly mysterious novel. Its disappearance for so long is tragic, even more so the possibility that we might have had more fiction from Leshia Harford but for the conservatism of Australian publishers in the 1920s.