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That Bloody Female Poet
- a novel before 'Google'.

Victorian India and twentieth century London.

Love, sex, violence and poetry - perhaps not too much poetry.

Follow Victorian poetess, Lawrence Hope's passage through India - and a novelists search for the truth of her life.

Laurence Hope, AKA Adela Florence Nicolson, AKA Violet. Born in 1865 near Bath, she died at her own hand in her beloved India in 1904.

Author of The Garden Of Karma, Indian Love and Stars Of The Desert. Her poetry was considered so risqué at the time, she had to publish under a mans name of Laurence Hope.

Plenty of people have pawed through he facts of Adela's life but there is only so far you can go. Any one with a library card and enough time on there hands can find the bones of it but the meat is missing. Perhaps this is what eighty years in the grave gets you, a veil of mystery over a simple life. But don't hold that thought. In fact or fiction she led anything but a plain and simple life. She spent eighteen months dressed as a boy following her husband, Colonel Nicolson as he fought in the Hindu Kush.

Look. A glimpse. The train is moving. He beckons. Without a moments hesitation she pushes aside the whimpering, waving wives and hitching up her skirts, runs. She a picture in bruise blue organdie topped off with a porkpie hat with a veil. Hands seek to restain her but wild horses will not stop her. She sprints until there is only a few yards in it. Malcolm is hanging from an open door. A last bounding effort and Malcolm and Adela cling to each other, kiss and laugh like baboons. The station recedes. Liberated at last! With a whoop of joy,She pulls the hat from her head and sends it tumbling, Bouncing into the slipstream of the speeding train. Hair almost cropped, breasts bound, skin stained, it was a different person detraining along with the rest or the regiment: an Afridi boy.