Laurence Hope

Laurence Hope was the pen name of Adela Florence Nicolson (1865–1904), an English poet born in Gloucestershire who went out to India at sixteen to join her father, an army officer, and married Colonel Malcolm Nicolson, a soldier twice her age who commanded a regiment on the North-West Frontier. Her three volumes of lyrics, beginning with The Garden of Kama in 1901, were published under a man's name and taken for translations from Indian languages; they are passionate, fatalistic and were set to music and sung everywhere in the Edwardian decade. Two months after her husband died under an operation in 1904, she poisoned herself in Madras at thirty-nine.