Abstract
In late October of 1904, Thomas Hardy received a letter from Madras, India, from someone he had never met: a retired member of the Indian Civil Service named W. Francis Grahame. The letter concerned a woman named Violet Nicolson whom he had met — briefly, the previous summer — at one of Mrs Blanche Crackanthorpe’s London literary salons. The letter informed Hardy that Mrs Nicolson — better known to the world by her pseudonym, ‘Laurence Hope’ — had committed suicide by swallowing poison. ‘My excuse for writing to you — being an absolute stranger,’ Grahame wrote, ‘is that the very day before she died I had a very long conversation with her, in the course of which she showed me your letter to her acknowledging her last volume of poems.’1
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Thomas Hardy to Arthur Symons, 23 October 1904, in The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, 7 vols, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford; New York: Clarendon Press, 1978–88), vol. 3, p. 142.
Thomas Hardy to Sir George Douglas, 26 October 1904, in The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, vol. 3, p. 143.
On Vivian Cory (‘Victorian Cross’), see Shoshana Milgram Knapp, ‘Victoria Cross’, British Short Fiction Writers, 1880–1914: The Realist Tradition, ed. William B. Thesing (Detroit, IL: Gale Research, 1993) pp. 75–84.
Mrs Walter Tibbets, Veiled Mysteries of India (London: Eveleigh Nash & Grayson, 1929) p.; 172.
Flora Annie Steel, The Garden of Fidelity (London: Macmillan, 1929) p. 203.
Violet Jacob, Diaries and Letters from India 1895–1900, ed. Carol Anderson (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1990) p. 73.
Dennis Kincaid, British Social Life in India, 1608–1937 (London: G. Routledge & Sons, 1939) p. 269.
Lesley Blanch, ‘Laurence Hope — A Shadow in the Sunlight’, Under a Lilac-Bleeding Star: Travels and Travellers (London: John Murray, 1963) p. 194.
Laurence Hope, Complete Love Lyrics (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1957) p. 99.
Alfred Austin, ‘The Growing Distaste for the Higher Forms of Poetry’, Critic, 45 (November 1904) p. 438.
Sara Suleri, The Rhetoric of English India (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992) p. 75.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1999 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Marx, E. (1999). Reviving Laurence Hope. In: Armstrong, I., Blain, V. (eds) Women’s Poetry, Late Romantic to Late Victorian. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27021-7_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27021-7_11
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-27023-1
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-27021-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)