[4] Cartwright Ady read widely from a young age, covering historical Italian texts, contemporary fiction and current British art publications.
She greatly admired the poetry of Robert Browning and his collection Men and Women (1855) with its poems ‘Fra Filippo Lippi’ and ‘Andrea del Sarto’, inspired by Italian Renaissance painters, was particularly influential.
She read works on Renaissance art, including those of Anna Jameson, John Ruskin, Charles Lock Eastlake, Walter Pater, and particularly the New History of Painting in Italy by Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle.
She visited Italy at least three times in the 1870s and on one of these occasions met Rev William Henry Ady whom she persuaded to take up the post of rector at Edgcote and married in 1880.
[7][11] Cartwright Ady's most celebrated books were her biographies of Isabella d'Este,[12] the Renaissance art patron, and her younger sister, Beatrice d'Este,[13] Cartwright Ady highlighted the lives of women in other writings, including books on Dorothy Sidney, mistress of Edmund Waller, Henrietta, Duchess of Orléans, sister of Charles II, Baldassare Castiglione and Christina of Denmark, the art-loving Danish expatriate.