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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'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.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Emily Gallagher Review of Cathy Perkins, The Shelf Life of Zora Cross
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Biography and History , August no. 5 2021; (p. 259-264)
— Review of The Shelf Life of Zora Cross 2019 single work biography Cathy Perkins’s The Shelf Life of Zora Cross begins with a scene not unfamiliar to readers of Australian literary history: a ‘little schoolgirl’ scribbling away on the ‘splintery verandah’ of her family’s bush home. According to family lore, the nine-year-old had been destined for the inky way long before she gripped her first pencil. An ode was written soon after her birth foretelling her career as a writer, and when the poet Mary Hannay Foott met the two-year-old in 1892 she was impressed to discover the youngster could compose rhymes.(Introduction)
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Poet, Writer, Daughter
2020
single work
essay
— Appears in: Inside Story , December 2020;'A daughter puts her mother’s reputation in the hands of her biographer'
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Cathy Perkins Unearths Zora Cross
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: History Australia , vol. 17 no. 2 2020; (p. 409-410)
— Review of The Shelf Life of Zora Cross 2019 single work biography'The name Zora Cross was destined to become a household one, said publisher George Robertson in 1918. One hundred years on, the first Cross biography has now been published, a debut for Cathy Perkins, an editor at the State Library of New South Wales. For this, Perkins deserves a toast. Cross was a hugely significant literary figure in the Australian interwar period whose life story demonstrates, among other things, that intellectual, creative women of this period could not exhibit the same eccentricity and impracticality routinely shown by their male counterparts.' (Introduction)
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‘History Will Find Me’ : The Life Journey of Zora Cross
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Women's Book Review , vol. 29 no. 1 2019; (p. 39-43)
— Review of The Shelf Life of Zora Cross 2019 single work biography 'As the gruesome reality of World War One dawned on Australians in 1917, a woman from Queensland published a book of love poetry which became one of the nation’s bestsellers. It was considered distasteful in society for a woman to display passion or allude to sex. Yet Zora Cross, born in Brisbane in 1890 and a granddaughter of Queensland pioneer and landowner, Zachariah Skyring, was to create something of a sensation with the publication of Songs of Love and Life. With a cover illustration by Norman Lindsay, the publication was bordering on scandalous.'(Introduction)
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Australian Sappho
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 417 2019; (p. 17, 19)
— Review of The Shelf Life of Zora Cross 2019 single work biography 'Just over one hundred years ago, Sydney readers were speaking in hushed tones about a shocking new book by a young woman, Zora Cross. A collection of love poems by an unknown would not normally have roused much interest, but because they came from a woman, and were frankly and emphatically erotic, the book was a sensation. It wasn’t, as a Bulletin reviewer said demurely, a set of sonnets to the beloved’s eyebrows. It was ‘well, all of him’. It broke the literary convention that restricted the expression of sexual pleasure to a male lover. Cross took Shakespeare’s sonnets as her inspiration. Her Songs of Love and Life (1917) was a long way from being Shakespearean, but it roused huge admiration. Cross was hailed as a genius, ‘an Australian Sappho’.' (Introduction)
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Cathy Perkins : The Shelf Life of Zora Cross
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: The Saturday Paper , 30 November - 6 December 2019;
— Review of The Shelf Life of Zora Cross 2019 single work biography -
Australian Sappho
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 417 2019; (p. 17, 19)
— Review of The Shelf Life of Zora Cross 2019 single work biography 'Just over one hundred years ago, Sydney readers were speaking in hushed tones about a shocking new book by a young woman, Zora Cross. A collection of love poems by an unknown would not normally have roused much interest, but because they came from a woman, and were frankly and emphatically erotic, the book was a sensation. It wasn’t, as a Bulletin reviewer said demurely, a set of sonnets to the beloved’s eyebrows. It was ‘well, all of him’. It broke the literary convention that restricted the expression of sexual pleasure to a male lover. Cross took Shakespeare’s sonnets as her inspiration. Her Songs of Love and Life (1917) was a long way from being Shakespearean, but it roused huge admiration. Cross was hailed as a genius, ‘an Australian Sappho’.' (Introduction) -
Cathy Perkins Unearths Zora Cross
2020
single work
review
— Appears in: History Australia , vol. 17 no. 2 2020; (p. 409-410)
— Review of The Shelf Life of Zora Cross 2019 single work biography'The name Zora Cross was destined to become a household one, said publisher George Robertson in 1918. One hundred years on, the first Cross biography has now been published, a debut for Cathy Perkins, an editor at the State Library of New South Wales. For this, Perkins deserves a toast. Cross was a hugely significant literary figure in the Australian interwar period whose life story demonstrates, among other things, that intellectual, creative women of this period could not exhibit the same eccentricity and impracticality routinely shown by their male counterparts.' (Introduction)
-
‘History Will Find Me’ : The Life Journey of Zora Cross
2019
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Women's Book Review , vol. 29 no. 1 2019; (p. 39-43)
— Review of The Shelf Life of Zora Cross 2019 single work biography 'As the gruesome reality of World War One dawned on Australians in 1917, a woman from Queensland published a book of love poetry which became one of the nation’s bestsellers. It was considered distasteful in society for a woman to display passion or allude to sex. Yet Zora Cross, born in Brisbane in 1890 and a granddaughter of Queensland pioneer and landowner, Zachariah Skyring, was to create something of a sensation with the publication of Songs of Love and Life. With a cover illustration by Norman Lindsay, the publication was bordering on scandalous.'(Introduction)
-
Emily Gallagher Review of Cathy Perkins, The Shelf Life of Zora Cross
2021
single work
review
— Appears in: Australian Journal of Biography and History , August no. 5 2021; (p. 259-264)
— Review of The Shelf Life of Zora Cross 2019 single work biography Cathy Perkins’s The Shelf Life of Zora Cross begins with a scene not unfamiliar to readers of Australian literary history: a ‘little schoolgirl’ scribbling away on the ‘splintery verandah’ of her family’s bush home. According to family lore, the nine-year-old had been destined for the inky way long before she gripped her first pencil. An ode was written soon after her birth foretelling her career as a writer, and when the poet Mary Hannay Foott met the two-year-old in 1892 she was impressed to discover the youngster could compose rhymes.(Introduction)
-
Poet, Writer, Daughter
2020
single work
essay
— Appears in: Inside Story , December 2020;'A daughter puts her mother’s reputation in the hands of her biographer'
Awards
- 2021 highly commended National Biography Award
- 2020 shortlisted New South Wales Premier's History Prize New South Wales History Prize — Australian History Prize