Her parents were married on 21 June 1853 in St Leonards (near Glenelg, South Australia), her father being based in Melbourne and her mother Matilda the eldest daughter of a prominent citizen.

[5] Caird wrote stories and plays from early childhood that reveal a proficiency in French and German as well as English.

She mixed with literary people, including Thomas Hardy, who admired her work, and educated herself in the humanities and science.

Among her later writings is an illustrated volume of travel essays, Romantic Cities of Provence (1906), and novels: The Stones of Sacrifice (1915), showing harmful effects of self-sacrifice on women, and The Great Wave (1931), a work of social-science fiction attacking the racism of negative eugenics.

[10] Caird published her first two novels, Whom Nature Leadeth (1883) and One That Wins (1887), under the pseudonym "G. Noel Hatton", but little heed was paid to them.

Her best-known novel, The Daughters of Danaus[12] (1894), tells of Hadria Fullerton, who aspires to be a composer, but finds that her obligations to her family and parents and as a wife and mother, allow little time for it.

Also well known is her short story "The Yellow Drawing-Room" (1892), where Vanora Haydon defies the conventional separation of spheres of men and women.