Helen Jerome

Helen Jerome was a journalist, author and playwright. She was the daughter of Irish immigrants and came from a large Catholic family. 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 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. 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 on 18 August 1835, after which she spent periods living in both Britain and the United States. She died in England in 1966.

Source: The University of Queensland, Australia