Cirrus@Austlit

'A daughter puts her mother’s reputation in the hands of her biographer'

'Poet and journalist Zora Cross burst onto the Australian literary scene in 1917 with her book Songs of Love and Life. Here was a young woman who looked like a Sunday school teacher, celebrating sexual passion in a provocative series of sonnets. She was hailed as a genius, and many expected her to endure as a household name alongside Shakespeare and Rossetti. While Cross’s fame didn’t last, she kept writing through financial hardship, personal tragedies and two world wars, producing a remarkable body of work. Her verse, prose and correspondence with the likes of Ethel Turner, George Robertson (of Angus & Robertson) and Mary Gilmore place Zora Cross among the key personalities of Australia’s literary world in the early twentieth century.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'If ever a magazine was a victim of its success, it was the Australian Woman's Mirror. Having started out as the Bulletin's little sister, it was so popular by 1960 that Frank Packer bought it in order to kill it and clear the market for his Australian Women's Weekly. He acquired the struggling Bulletin as part of the package. When the Mirror appears as a footnote to the legend of its older brother, we get no sense of what the magazine achieved or how important it was to readers and contributors.' (Introduction)