[1] Her father, James Sterling, owned large blast furnaces, and she claimed to be a descendant of William Bradford.

In 1868, she traveled to Europe for further training, where she sang at Darlington in Handel's Messiah on December 17 and took lessons with W. H. Cummings in London before proceeding to Germany.

[5] Her first engagement in London was at the promenade concert on November 6, 1873; she choose to sing the "Slumber Song" from Bach's Christmas Oratorio and some classical Lieder.

[3] Engagements for high-class concerts gradually ceased, but she still sang in Oratorio, mainly German works, including Wagner.

She became drawn to simple sentimental ballads, especially those with semi-religious or moralising words and invested Caller Herrin with singular significance.

[3] She sang Behrend's Crossing the Bar at a concert in Prince's Hall on Piccadilly in May 1894, along withThere is Rest for the Weary by Florence Eva Simpson .

When she arrived in Auckland from Sydney, she was greeted by Annie Jane Schnackenberg, national president of the Women's Christian Temperance Union of New Zealand.

[10] At their meeting at the Grand Hotel, Schnackenberg presented Sterling with a bouquet of white camellias (a suffragist symbol) and maiden hair fern "as a co-worker in the organisation."

It was clear from a news article expounding on Sterling's career that her work was greatly admired: "Antoinette Sterling comes to show us how a perfect voice, perfectly educated, and controlled by a perceptive, devotional, and feeling mind, can lead us to heights and breadths and lengths and depths of musical delight such as we have not before understood.