Caroline Leakey's Lyra Australis: Or Attempts to Sing in a Strange Land (1854) is closely connected with feminist representations of women's sexuality and the legacy of the Romantic women's tradition in Britain. While Leakey's novel, The Broad Arrow, Being Passages from the Life of Maida Gwynnham, a Lifer (1859), relating to the brutalities of the penal system in Tasmania has been critically noted as part of a growing concern with ideas of an emergent Australian national identity, the more broadly feminist aspects of her poetry linking Tasmania symbolically with women's sexuality are significant to developments in transnational women's poetry of the period. Leakey's poetry is engaged with a tradition of British poetic works, including those of Caroline Norton and Caroline Bowles (later Southey), which were exemplars of the narrative poem on the fallen woman and the imprisoned woman. Leakey's poetry constitutes a strong rejection of the increasing restrictions placed on these sympathetic narratives. When viewed in the context of Victorian shifts away from earlier works by Charlotte Smith, Felicia Hemans, Letitia Elizabeth Landon and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Leakey's poetry is more radical by the standards of British women's poetry than has been previously recognized.

The trope of the fallen woman, so prevalent in Lyra Australis, should also be recognized as a transnational narrative. This attracted localized colonial and emergent nationalist responses and was altered with increasing evangelical religious fervour, as in American examples such as Emily Chubbuck Judson's short story ‘Lucy Dutton’, published in Alderbrook: A Collection of Fanny Forester's Village Sketches, Poems etc (1847). The narrative of the fallen woman was employed in works by British Romantic women poets, including Norton's The Sorrows of Rosalie (1829) and Bowles’ Ellen Fitzarthur (1820), as a feminist trope speaking to the sexual double standard, inequality and the need for financial independence. Similarly, the metaphoric use of flowers in Leakey's poetry reflects a strategy to articulate concerns over the fallen woman and the sexual double standard. While Leakey's novel has been recognized as a feminist text, her volume of poetry has been read as disconnected from the Romantic women's tradition. Yet the use of the figure of the fallen woman is also important for representations of both the woman as poet and class, challenging aspects of the domestic ideal.