A Woman's Friendship

The grand Melbourne Exhibition of 1888 is a most agreeable place for Margaret Clive, a journalist’s wife, and Patty Kinnaird, married to a squatter, to pursue their ‘purely intellectual friendship’ with handsome, widowed and wealthy Seaton Macdonald ... The triangular relationship changes, however, when the women are house guests at Yattock, Macdonald’s magnificent country property - and unadmitted attractions begin to surface. In this gentle satire of class and sexuality, Ada Cambridge opens a window on Melbourne society of the 1880s and illuminates some important issues of the day - reform of dress and diet, the ‘marriage question’, socialism and women’s suffrage. This edition of A Woman's Friendship also contains a short story, The Reform Club, written by Cambridge thirty-one years later.