Original artwork for the cover of 'Songs of Love and Life'1917

The sonnets in Zora Cross’s Songs of Love and Life were a rare expression of sexual desire from a woman’s point of view, but the artist Norman Lindsay refused to illustrate them. He told the publisher George Robertson that women couldn’t write love poetry because their ‘spinal column’ wasn’t connected to the ‘productive apparatus’. But Lindsay did produce a cover artwork for the book.