‘You may try, but you can never imagine, what it is to have a man's force of genius in you, and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl’. This cry of anguish blazes from the pages of George Eliot's novel, Daniel Deronda. Spence quoted it in an article on Eliot's life and works; she paused at several points which suggest parallels with her own life, observing that the sentiment best expressed the condition Mary Ann Evans experienced in her youth. Since Spence considered ‘the province of genius’ to be not so much superlative creativeness, but rather ‘to call forth a responsive spark from the souls with which it is in communion’, Deronda's mother's outburst could stand as her own. For 30 years, Spence defied social convention to work as a journalist, but she did so without acknowledgement, recognition, or even much in the way of financial return.

The patriarchal social order which so constrained her attempt to maintain her independence – to become her own breadwinner, while retaining freedom from the double subjection of women of the working class – made a ‘lady journalist’ a contradiction in terms. Margaret Stevenson, wife of one of the Register's earlier directors, might have contributed not only poems but also political articles to that paper; Spence might have had occasional pieces printed in her brother-in-law's South Australian; but both sheltered behind initials and pen-names.