When Spence first began to write she said, ‘the novel was the line of least resistance’. She was referring to the world that she had first learned about from her mother and her Scottish school-mistress, in which her everyday environment took on colour and adventure from reading the novels of Sir Walter Scott. She had buried herself in that world during her years as a shy, impoverished adolescent, in strange, uncongenial surroundings. The Spences' membership of the South Australian Mechanics’ Institute and its library had enabled her to extend her reading with the work of English writers of her own time. She introduced the hero of her first published novel by presenting him, in the words of the critic Frederick Sinnett, ‘talking modern literature, and displaying a highly cultivated mind with a promptitude and pertinacity frightful to contemplate’. The authors he mentioned included not only Shakespeare, Scott and Byron, but also Dickens and Thackeray, whose novels were still reaching the colony in serial instalments in British periodicals at the time when Spence was creating him.

This was a world in which women were already claiming a voice in the public sphere. The 1840s, when the novel was the dominant literary form of writing in English, saw the publication of novels by each of the three Brontë sisters. In 1853 J. M. Ludlow observed despondently ‘the fact that at this particular moment of the world's history the very best novels in several great countries happened to have been written by women’.