Catherine Helen Spence was nineteenth-century South Australia's best-known woman, famous not only for her writings but also for her active public engagement in social reform. She was described as the "Grand Old Woman of South Australia" at her eightieth birthday celebration in 1905, at which South Australia's chief justice said she was "the most distinguished woman they had in Australia. . . . There was no one in the whole Commonwealth, whose career covered so wide a ground. She was a novelist, a critic, an accomplished journalist, a preacher, a lecturer, a philanthropist, and a social and moral reformer." Such a list of accomplishments would have been remarkable in a man, but in a woman of the time they were extraordinary. Spence's emergence from the private domain, considered the proper sphere of women in the nineteenth century, into public life indicated unusual strength of character and abilities. She saw herself as a...