Rapture's Roadway

Travel writer Virginia Jealous releases Memoir and Travelogue

In search of poet Laurence Hope.

Esteemed Lonely Planet writer, travel journalist, and awardwinning poet Virginia Jealous releases her first book: a unique blend of memoir, biography and travelogue.

After the death of her father, writer and poet Virginia Jealous travelled across the world to document the life of his obsession – the scandalous 20th century poet Laurence Hope (aka Violet Nicolson).

Laurence Hope's poetry, with its sexually adventurous themes, thrilled and scandalised the Empire in India and beyond. In the first years of the twentieth century she was the most famous poet in the world; by World War II, she was forgotten – until John Jealous became incomprehensibly obsessed with her.

Rapture's Roadway is the first full-length account of Laurence Hope's life. Virginia takes the reader from Australia to India, England, Spain and China as she documents Hope's life and work, and makes profound discoveries of her father's past along the way. Told via three intertwined narratives across three different eras, Virginia's story is one of love, loss and rediscovery that remains alive with contemporary and universal resonance.

For fans of H is for Hawk by Helen Macdonald, and Running in the Family by Michael Ondaatje, Rapture's Roadway untangles truth and lies, and where that's not possible, celebrates the enigma of not knowing.

Virginia Jealous writing includes travel journalism, essays and poetry. She's written many guidebooks for Lonely Planet and travel articles for the Weekend Australian. Her poetry appears in a range of publications and she's been invited to present work at arts festivals in Australia, Singapore and India. Virginia lives on the road and out of a suitcase when not at home in Denmark, Western Australia. There, she works seasonally in the local Visitor Centre, bird watches daily and – in winter, with binoculars in hand – walks the headlands looking for whales in the Southern Ocean.

Rapture's Roadway
Ventura Press/Peter Bishop Books
Author: Virginia Jealous
RRP: $29.99