Nicolson, Adela (Violet) Florence

(1865-1904)

   Born in Gloucestershire, she was educated in Richmond, Surrey. When she was sixteen she joined her parents at Lahore, where her father was in the Indian army, and spent most of her life there. She married Colonel (later General) Malcolm Hassels Nicolson, a Bengal army veteran, in 1889. Her first book of poems - written under the pseudonym "Laurence Hope" which remained her pen-nameThe Garden of Kama (1901) was hugely successful. She committed suicide by poison two months after her husband died. Many of her translations are thought to be her own work, and some of her poems were set to music by Amy Woodforde-Finden. Indian Love Lyrics was the title of a 1933 movie based on Hope's work, with Catherine Calvert in the lead role. Her son published her Last Poems in 1922. Her other publications: Stars of the Desert, 1903. Last Poems, 1905. India's Love Lyrics Including Garden of Kama, 1919. Some of her poems: "Ashore," "I Shall Forget," "In the Early, Pearly Morning," "Less Then the Dust," "The Bride," "The Masters," "The Temple Bells," "Till I Awake."

   Sources: Dictionary of National Biography. Electronic Edition 1.1. Oxford University Press, 1997. Four Indian Love Lyrics From "The Garden of Kama" (song book). Hope, Laurence and Finden, Amy Wooforde. Boosey and Co., New York, 1943. India's Love Lyrics by Laurence Hope. Dodd, Mead and Company, 1902. The Home Book of Modern Verse. Burton Egbert Stevenson, ed. Henry Holt, 1953. The Indian Love Lyrics Review, The New York Times, Movies (http://movies2.nytimes.com/gst/movies/movie.html?v_id=96522). The Oxford Book of Sonnets. John Fuller, ed. Oxford University Press, 2000.