A MODEST display by museum standards, the subject would have preferred it so. Effects a shy, retiring spinster could carry from relative to relative; sepia snapshots of a seaside town, some precious letters, personal keepsakes, a trusted typewriter...

And books. Books with titles as innocuous as their covers, but proving the adage about them.

Because some judged these books - long out of print - the height of sedition in Victorian Britain, challenging no less an authority than the Anglican Church.

It's their author this exhibition is dedicated to, the enigmatic Ada Bayley who, having viewed much of her life through vicarage windows, found herself denounced from pulpits; attracting the very ecclesiastical intolerance she stood against.

Ada's interred at Bosbury churchyard, alongside the preaching cross with an inscription appropriate to that stand: 'Honour not the Cross, but honour God for Christ'.

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Lynn Ardrey regularly meets her there. The story of Lynn and her 'novel' friend featured in The Hereford Times last June.

Ada is a friend Lynn wants to share and the exhibition - which opens this week to run for a month at Hereford City Museum - offers an ideal introduction.

Lynn would like to think she knows Ada as much as anyone can. To the readers of Ada's best sellers back at the turn of the last century - Queen Victoria, the era's great statesman William Gladstone and the renowned social reformer John Ruskin among them - she was Edna Lyall, a pseudonym assumed to allow expression.

Unlike other Victorian woman writers, though, she felt no compulsion for that identity to be male. Writing dictated Ada's direction from an early age, a devotion she carried into adulthood and life as a spinster living, as Victorian spinsters did, with a succession of relatives. Shy, retiring, conventional Ada - at least on the surface.

Faith was her foundation, a Christianity that represented a reason to believe not a doctrinal discipline by which belief was defined. It was in making this literal that she courted controversy.

Popular tales taken to be defences for tolerance and freedom of reason in religion weren't welcomed by an Anglican 'old guard' already antagonised by increasing secularism.

So it was that Ada faced such virulent attack from sections of her church - and the scandal sheets of the day. Uncomfortable times for her family, many of whom were clergy.

It was one of them, the Rev. R Burges Bayly, who brought her to Bosbury where he was parish vicar.

Here, Ada found peace, writing of Herefordshire in summer as 'hard to beat'.

And it was in Bosbury that she was interred, a discreet service early on St Valentine's Day 1903 accorded with a will that specified one of the churches in which she worshipped to be her final resting place.

The display combines 'evocations' of Ada's life and works with a tribute to her 'history' novels - particularly In Spite of All - set in Civil War Herefordshire and inspired by the story of Bosbury preaching cross.