'Aston was born at Carisbrook, Victoria, and lost her sight by the age of seven. In 1881 she met an itinerant missionary who taught her to read Braille and the following year she left home to attend a school for the blind in St Kilda. She enrolled in an Arts Degree at the University of Melbourne - becoming the first blind student in an Australian tertiary institution - but withdrew due to anxiety and lack of resources. She went on to become a teacher, eventually heading the Victorian school for the Blind and working to establish the Association for the Advancement of the Blind and the Victorian Association of Braille Writers. She wrote popular song lyrics and published five volumes of verse, two serialised novellas, an autobiography and two collections of short stories: The Woolinappers: or Some Tales of the By-ways of Methodism (1905) and Old Timers: Sketches and Word Pictures of the Old Pioneers (1938).' (Source: Colonial Australian Popular Fiction website)
