“Barrister,” the clerk told her. “Lives alone, apparently. No marriage or birth certificates linked to the name. Are you staying in London for long, Miss Dunne?”

Ruby had come to England to apprentice with Dr. Elizabeth Garrett, a physician who founded St. Mary’s Dispensary in Marylebone, a place for poor women to receive medical care. It was the first of its kind, staffed entirely by women. Dr. Garrett, only four years older than Ruby, was the first female in Britain to qualify as a doctor and a surgeon. Shortly after opening the dispensary, she placed a notice in London newspapers, seeking college-educated women who wished to become doctors and nurses. In Hobart Town, five months later, Ruby opened the Saturday Review and spied it.

In her long letter to Dr. Garrett, Ruby explained that she’d grown up with a surgeon father and midwife mother in a frontier town on an island off the coast of mainland Australia. From a young age, she’d been put to work polishing instruments, cataloguing medication, and assisting in the operating room. As the town expanded, so had the family practice. Eventually her father founded Warwick Hospital, named after the town in the Midlands where he was raised. Ruby’s dream was to help her father run the practice one day.

But she had learned all she could from her parents. Her mother’s medical skills were based on folk remedies and trial and error, not scholarship. Her father had taught her anatomy and the rudiments of surgery, but now, at twenty-eight, she craved the kind of formal education he’d received at the Royal College of Surgeons in London. Women were not allowed to apply to medical school in Australia, so this opportunity would be life changing. She proposed studying with Dr. Garrett for three months so that she might return to Warwick Hospital with the latest information and techniques.

Dr. Garrett wrote back: “I will find you reasonable lodgings, and you will stay for a year and earn a degree.”

A month after receiving this letter, Ruby was on a ship bound for London.

Ruby had never met a woman as frank, outspoken, and boldly revolutionary as Dr. Garrett. Determined to go to medical school, in 1862, at the age of twenty-six, she’d found a way in on a technicality. The Society of Apothecaries had not thought to forbid women from taking their exams until after Dr. Garrett passed them all. Later, as a member of the British Women’s Suffrage Committee, she presented petitions to Parliament demanding the vote for female heads of household.

“Penal transportation to Tasmania only ended fifteen years ago,” she said with characteristic bluntness when Ruby arrived in Marylebone. “I must ask: Are you related to a convict?”

Ruby blanched slightly. This still wasn’t spoken of freely where she was from. But she was determined to be as forthright as Dr. Garrett. “I am,” she said. “My mother is from Glasgow and was sent to Australia at the age of sixteen. Many people in Tasmania have similar origins, though few talk about it.”