Zora Bernice May Cross was an Australian poet, novelist and journalist.
Background
Zora Bernice May Cross was born on May 18, 1890 on Eagle Farm, Brisbane to Earnest William Cross and Mary Louisa Eliza Annual Her father was a Sydney born accountants Cross inherited her love for literature from both her parents, poetry from her mother and Celtic knowledge from her father, who was also the son of an Irish printer.
Education
And was educated at Ipswich Girls" Grammar School and then Sydney Teachers" College from 1909 to 1910.
Career
She taught for three years and then worked as a journalist, for the Boomerang and then as a freelance writer Later on in her life, Cross had a "de facto" husband, David McKee Wright, who she had two daughters with. She was known not only for her poems, including sonnet sequences, but for a private life scandalous by the standards of her time.
She wrote about sex, childbirth and war, in terms also considered too explicit by contemporaries.
Cross supported herself and her family though acting in one of Phillip Lytton"s companies and teaching elocutions and then some freelance journalisms. As Bernice May, she wrote a regular column in the 1930s for the Australian Women"s Mirror.