India's Love Lyrics

First published in 1901, India's Love Lyrics made its author an overnight literary celebrity. Writing under the pen name Laurence Hope, Adela Florence Nicolson conjured a world of rose gardens, temple bells, moonlit palaces, and passionate farewells, in verses whose musicality carried them from drawing rooms to concert halls—most famously in 'The Kashmiri Song,' beloved by singers for generations. This edition reproduces the complete, unabridged original text, preserving every poem exactly as it first appeared, and pairs it with a new introduction and reader's notes that illuminate the poems' imagery, their Edwardian popularity, and the complicated colonial context in which an English writer adopted Indian voices. Whether you are returning to a favorite lyric or discovering these poems for the first time, this volume offers a fascinating window into a vanished literary moment—romantic, musical, and unmistakably of its age. Part of The Founding Texts Library.