Catherine Helen Spence was a charismatic public speaker in the late nineteenth century, a time when women were supposed to speak only at their own firesides. In challenging the custom and convention that confined middle-class women to the domestic sphere, she was carving a new path into the world of public politics along which other women would follow, in the first Australian colony to win votes for women.

So the new introduction re-contextualises the biography in important ways and alerts the reader to some fresh issues. Yet the biography itself could never have been described as naïve, or simply adulatory. It valorises an individual who was extraordinarily intelligent, energetic, humane, likeable and well-read. Thus much for the private woman, but she built herself an important place in Australian history with these resources, and a conviction that her responsibility was to the state and to the reform of public life. The decades she spent, for example, in educating readers and audiences about the workings of proportional representation still have their legacy in the manner in which Australia’s upper houses of parliament are elected.'

Helen Thompson Source: Australian Book Review