Laurence Hope

Born Adela Florence Cory in Gloucestershire in 1865, she later became known as Violet Nicolson and published as Laurence Hope. She spent much of her adult life in India after joining her family there as a teenager, and that experience deeply shaped the atmosphere, imagery, and emotional tone of her poems.

Her best-known books include The Garden of Kama and other love lyrics that brought her a wide readership in the early twentieth century. Writing under a male pseudonym gave her passionate poems an added layer of mystery, and readers were drawn to their music, sensuality, and sense of faraway places.

Her life was brief and troubled: her husband died in 1904, and she died the same year at just 39. Even so, Laurence Hope left behind a distinctive poetic voice—melancholic, theatrical, and unforgettable to readers drawn to fin-de-siècle romance.