Adela Florence Nicolson

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Adela Florence Nicolson

Adela Florence Nicolson (nee Cory) (born April 9, 1865 in Stoke Bishop , Gloucestershire , † October 4, 1904 in Madras , India ) was an English poet who published under the pseudonym Laurence Hope .

Life

She was born on April 9, 1865, the second of three daughters to Colonel Arthur Cory and his wife Fanny Elizabeth Griffin. The father was stationed with the British Army in Lahore , which is why she was raised by relatives in her English homeland. In 1881 she left England to live in India with her father . Her father was the editor of the Lahore regional section of The Civil and Military Gazette . He got Rudyard Kipling , one of his daughter's contemporaries, his first job as a journalist . His other daughters, Annie Sophie Cory and Isabel Cory, also embarked on literary careers: Annie wrote popular, passionate novellas under the pseudonym Victoria Cross , while Isabel initially assisted her father and later succeeded him as editor of the Sind Gazette .

In April 1889, Adela married Colonel Malcolm Hassels Nicolson, who was twice her age and was in command of the 3rd Baluchi Regiment. As a talented linguist , he introduced her to his love for India, its people, customs and food. All of this combined gave the couple an eccentric look from the perspective of their compatriots. They lived in Mhow for about ten years . Shortly after Malcolm Hassel's Nicolson died after prostate surgery, Adela, who had been prone to depression since childhood, committed suicide in Madras on October 4, 1904 at the age of 39 by poisoning herself. Her son Malcolm published her selected poems posthumously in 1922.

plant

In 1901 Adela Florence Nicolson himself published Garden of Kama , which appeared a year later in the United States under the title India's Love Lyrics . She tried to disguise the work as a translation by various poets, but the attempt at deception soon fell under suspicion. Accordingly, William Somerset Maugham brought out a story loosely based on the developing literary scandal, titled The Colonel's Lady .

Her poems often used images and symbols of the poets of the north-western border of India and the Sufi poets from Persia . She soon became one of the most popular romantic poets of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. In terms of content, her poems usually revolve around unrequited love and loss, which usually ended in death after the unfortunate course of such affairs. Many of the poems have an air of autobiographical admission.

Her poetry was extremely popular during the Edwardian era when she could rival Thomas Hardy and James Elroy Flecker . Two films ( Less Than Dust , 1916; The Indian Love Lyrics , 1923) and a few musical adaptations were based on her poems, but since then her literary reputation has dwindled to the point of barely noticeable.

The British composer Amy Woodforde-Find set four of her poems from The Garden of Kama to music ; the most popular was the Kashmiri song . After this was well received by critics, she adapted four more poems from Stars of the Desert (1903) into musical forms with similar success .

Details of the life of Adela Florence Nicolson are not easy to find out because there were no correspondence in her estate, but Lesley Blanch published some biographical information in her work Under A Lilac-Bleeding Star based on the memories of her son Malcolm that were never printed. Violet Jacob describes the Nicolsons' environment in Diaries and Letters from India , but most of what can be said about their personal life comes from the careful interpretation of their poems, such as their dependence on her husband shortly before her suicide in the following poem:

"I, who of lighter love wrote many a verse,
Made public never words inspired by thee,
Lest strangers' lips should carelessly rehearse
Things that were sacred and too dear to me.
Thy soul was noble; through these fifteen years
Mine eyes familiar, found no fleck nor flaw,
Stern to thyself, thy comrades' faults and fears
Proved generosity thine only law.
Small joy was I to thee; before we met
Sorrow had left thee all too sad to save.
Useless my love - as vain as this regret
That pours my hopeless life across thy grave ".

literature

  • Francis L. Bickley / Sayoni Basu, Nicolson nee Cory, Adela Florence pseud. Laurence Hope (1865-1904), Dictionary of National Biography 2004.
  • Lesley Blanch: "Laurence Hope - A Shadow in the Sunlight." Under a Lilac-Bleeding Star: Travels and Travelers. London: John Murray, 1963: 184-208.
  • Jennifer Carter: Love Among the Lotuses. NLA News (National Library of Australia) 12: 2 (November 2001).
  • John Jealous: Laurence Hope (1865-1904) . The 1890s: An Encyclopedia of British Literature, Art, and Culture. New York: Garland, 1993. pp. 283f.
  • Edward Marx: Violet (Adela Florence) Nicolson. Encyclopedia of British Women Writers. Ed. Paul Schlueter and June Schlueter. New York: Garland, 1999. pp. 476f.
  • Edward Marx: "Laurence Hope (Adela Florence Cory Nicolson)." Late Nineteenth- And Early Twentieth-Century British Women Poets (Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 240). Ed. William Thesing. Detroit: Gale Group, 2001. pp. 88-93.
  • Edward Marx: Reviving Laurence Hope. Women's Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian: Gender and Genre . Ed. Isobel Armstrong and Virginia Blain. London; New York: Macmillan Press, 1998. Catalog listing
  • Edward Marx: Decadent Exoticism and the Woman Poet. Women and British Aestheticism. Ed. Kathy Psomiades and Talia Schaffer. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000.
  • Edward Marx: The Exotic Transgressions of 'Laurence Hope'. In: The Idea of ​​a Colony: Cross-Culturalism in Modern Poetry . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.
  • Anindyo Roy: Gold and Bracelet, Water and Wave: Signature and Translation in the Indian Poetry of Adela Cory Nicolson. In: Women: a cultural review 13.2 (2002): pp. 145-168.

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Nicolson, Adela Florence
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Hope, Laurence (pseudonym); Cory, Adela Florence (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British poet
DATE OF BIRTH April 9, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH Stoke Bishop , Gloucestershire , United Kingdom
DATE OF DEATH 4th October 1904
Place of death Madras , India