The forgotten poetess

musings

Adela Florence Cory was just 16 when she joined her parents in India in 1881. Her father was a Colonel in the Indian Army. She was gifted among the three sisters. She composed and played music, sang and painted. At Lahore, her father edited the Civil and Military Gazette and she gleefully took over from him. As Adela, her life quickly fell into a pattern of a ‘memsahib’, surrounded by dancing, tennis and flirting.

But there was another person inside her, beginning to look about her and see another world, infinitely strange and compelling, far removed from her own. And particularly bitter about English intolerance, the colonial English men did not interest her. Lazy, languid years seemed interminable — till 1889, when every bit of her world changed when she met Colonel Malcolm Nicolson. He was completely out of type — he loved India and the Indians. She was swept off her feet. She was 24, and he was 46.

It was the happiest of marriages. She had found the man who knew his India as she longed to do. Thanks to him, she penetrated India with sensuous understanding and her love burst forth in verse as she had rediscovered herself now as Laurence Hope.

Her verses, some inspired by legends of the people, by their literature, some from the depths of her own emotion, have left a portrait of this love in many guises. A lover to his mistress, a slave to her unattainable lord and master, an exile to his home; tender legends, terrible ones, the anguished cry of the deserted lover, the call of the prowling jackal at dusk and always, the scarlet thread of longing — ‘O! life, I have taken you for my lover!’ she wrote. 

But it was India which was, for her, the incarnation of her passion, the means by which she lived to the full, seeking to be one with the plains and the hills; to know the many races, their beliefs and lives. Often she went among them secretly, as a man disguised as a Pathan boy. She wrote in the ‘Song of the Parao’...

These are my people, and this my land
I hear the pulse of her secret soul...
...Washed in the light of a clear fierce sun,Heart, my heart, the journey is done.
Over and over, she sounds this ecstatic note: on the country of her adoption. In the India of those days, for English women,  India remained something that must be kept at arm’s length, even if it charmed them.

Malcolm Nicolson was born in 1843 of Highland Scottish descent. He saw much active service, in the frontier regions and Afghanistan, which he reconnoitred, disguised as a Pathan. Nicolson was a man of supreme courage and his wife must have found this very irresistible.

When in 1901 Heinemann published her ‘Garden of Kama’, the acclaim was instant. Mr Hope, an unknown young poet, showed fresh and splendid talent. Critics and public wanted more. Then the secret was out. It was a woman — Major-General Nicolson’s wife! Now they found themselves social lions, objects of curiosity and admiration.

They found life cheap in an Indian backwater. Necessities were few. Her songs were sold for sums which, by today’s values, seem insulting. Five guineas for one; three for another. Yet she was pleased.

For a while, the General had not seemed well. In Madras, the General’s ill-health was diagnosed as something a minor operation would set right. It would be better to have it done at once. But destiny willed otherwise. He had been given too much anaesthetic, and there was not enough oxygen to revive him. Death had found Malcolm Nicolson. This was a devastating blow for Laurence Hope. Her friends had not realised how shattering her loss would be. Except in her verses, she never displayed much emotion. She could not rally, and seemed racked by remorse.

An old friend, Eardly Norton, the distinguished Madras Barrister, lent her his house, and here she spent the next month, trying to concern herself about a tombstone. But she was a living ghost “who cut mysterious initials on the bark of many trees,” wrote Eardly Norton, later. What these initials stood no one could know. But her last poem, ‘Indian Love’, was unmistakenly dedicated to her husband:

Useless my love – as vain as this regret
That pours my hopeless life across thy grave.

By the time the manuscript reached her publishers, she was dead. On the afternoon of October 4, two months after her husband’s death, she poisoned herself. They were buried together, in St Mary’s cemetery, Madras. Laurence Hope, so steeped in Indian tradition, is now a forgotten poet.

Drifting, drifting along the River,
Under the light of a wan low moon,
Steady, the paddles; Boatmen, steady –
Why should we reach the sea so soon?

Sweet are thy ways and thy strange
caresses,
That sear as flame, and exult as wine.
But I care only for that wild moment
When my soul arises and reaches thine.

— ‘Surface Rights’ by Laurence Hope