Adela Florence Cory was born on 9th April 1865 at Stoke Bishop, Gloucestershire, the second of three daughters to Colonel Arthur Cory and Fanny Elizabeth Griffin. Adele was initially raised by relatives as her father was employed in Lahore in the service of the British army. Eventually at 16, in 1881, she went to India to be reunited with her family. Her father was now the editor of the Lahore arm of The Civil and Military Gazette. Adela’s sisters Annie Sophie and Isabel also has literary careers. Annie would go on to write popular, racy novels while Isabel assisted and then succeeded their father as editor of the Sind Gazette.
In April 1889 Adela married Colonel Malcolm Hassels Nicolson, a man twice her age and the commandant of the 3rd Battalion, the Baluch Regiment. Nicolson was a reputed action man and linguist and introduced his young wife to the glories of India, its customs, culture and food.
This deep immersion helped give the couple an eccentric reputation. In an expedition to the Zhob Valley in 1890 she disguised herself as a Pathan boy to follow her husband through the passes along the Afghan border. They would eventually live in Mhow for nearly a decade.
In 1901, she published ‘Garden of Kama’, which, a year later, was published in America with the title ‘India’s Love Lyrics’.
She originally attempted to pass the work off as translations of various poets, but this claim soon fell away. Still she shied away from any public recognition and used the publishing pseudonym of Laurence Hope to further shield herself.
Adela’s poems were often suffused with imagery and symbols from the poets of the North-West Frontier and the Sufi poets of Persia and helped make her one of the most popular romantic poets of the Edwardian era with their themes of unrequited love, loss and often, the death that followed such an unhappy state of affairs.
Two months after Nicolson died in a prostate operation, Adela, who had been prone to depression since childhood, committed suicide by poisoning herself with perchloride of mercury.
Adela Florence Cory Nicolson died at the age of 39 on 4th October 1904 in Madras.
