India’s Love Lyrics by Laurence Hope

Description

India’s Love Lyrics made sensation at the turn of the century: a book of poems written, the public learned, by an Englishwoman under the name Laurence Hope. Adela Florence Nicolson knew her subject from inside — she spent her adult life in India, where she married a soldier of the Indian Army — and her verses carried an unhurried, unapologetic intimacy that Victorian poetry rarely attempted aloud. What J. M. Barrie or R. L. Stevenson would have called the indefinable thing, Hope called plainly by name, and her public rewarded the honesty.

The collection opens with notes of separation and courtship and moves through the gardens, rivers, and monsoon country of a subcontinent filtered through a fiercely personal imagination. Her hallmark is musicality — poems meant to be sung, and more than one of them, set to music, became the popular songs of the day.

Reading these lyrics a century on, one hears the steady voice of a woman writing about her own marriage and her own grief in the cadence of Indian love songs. The regret that runs beneath the brightness — the lover left, the road not taken, the shadow of an early and tragic death — gives the poems their lasting ache. India’s Love Lyrics remains the purest introduction to one of the most unusual and moving voices in English poetry of its era.

Why readers come back to it

• Passionate verse that feels genuinely confessional, decades before confessional poetry.
• India rendered in a voice unusual for its time: intimate, musical, unsentimental.
• A short, luminous book that rewards reading aloud.

About this DodaBooks edition

This edition presents the complete collection with clean professional typesetting, a working table of contents, and optimized reading on phone, tablet, and e-reader, so the music of the lines carries across every device.