Helen Jerome was a journalist, author and playwright. She was the daughter of Irish immigrants and came from a large Catholic family. Her father, William Bruton (d. 1918), worked for many years as a civil servant in the New South Wales postal department. One of her brothers was the solicitor and occasional Bulletin contributor, William Joseph Bruton. Details of her early life remain to be established; however, she appears to have been living in Sydney by the later 1890s, when she was a regular contributor to the Sydney Catholic newspaper, the Freeman's Journal. She married publisher and conman Armand Jerome at the Friary in Waverly, in Sydney on 11 June 1900. He died on 26 February 1924.
In the following decades she travelled widely, to East Asia, Europe, Russia and the United States, returning to Australia intermittently. During this period she wrote numerous articles on her travels and experiences for Australian, English and American newspapers and magazines. Her daughter Carmen attended the progressive Sydney girls' school, Shirley College, at Edgecliffe, matriculating in 1920. Jerome appears to have left Australia permanently in the early 1920s. She then appears to have spent a lengthy period in the United States, where she would later became well known for her stage adaptations of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre.
She remarried by special license to George Dominic Ali (27 January 1862 - 14 March 1942) at the Hyde Park Hotel in London on 18 August 1835, after which she spent periods living in both Britain and the United States. She died in England in 1966.
