Annie Sophie Cory

Annie Sophie Cory (1 October 1868 – 2 August 1952) was the author of popular, racy, exotic novels under the pseudonyms Victoria Cross(e), Vivian Cory and V.C. Griffin.

Life

She was born as the third of three daughters to Colonel Arthur Cory and Fanny Elizabeth Griffin. Her father was employed in the British army at Lahore, where he was editor of the Lahore arm of The Civil and Military Gazette, and Annie Sophie Cory grew up in India. She completed her education in England. She had her first piece, Theodora, a Fragment, published in the Yellow Book in 1895. In the same year she wrote The Woman Who Didn't, a response to Grant Allen's book The Woman Who Did.

She never married, and after her father's death she travelled widely on the Continent with her uncle, Heneage McKenzie Griffin. After his death in Italy in 1939, she settled in Monte Carlo to live with female friends.

One of her sisters, Adela Florence Nicolson, became famous as the exotic poet of Indian verses, "Laurence Hope."

Novels

The following list is taken from A Companion to On-line & Off-line Literature.

• The Woman Who Didn't (1895; original title: Consummation; retitled by John Lane for his Keynote series as a response to Grant Allen's The Woman Who Did)
• Paula (1896)
• A Girl of the Klondike (1899)
• Anna Lombard (1901)
• Six Chapters of a Man's Life (1903)
• To-morrow? (1904)
• The Religion of Evelyn Hastings (1905)
• Life of My Heart (1905)
• Six Women (1906)
• Life's Shop-Window (1907)
• Five Nights (1908)
• The Eternal Fires (1910)
• The Love of Kusuma (1910)
• Self and the Other (1911)
• The Life Sentence (1912)
• The Night of Temptation (1912)
• The Greater Law (aka Hilda Against The World) (1914)
• Daughters of Heaven (short stories, 1920)
• Over Life's Edge (1921)
• The Beating Heart (1924)
• Electric Love (1929)
• The Unconscious Sinner (aka The Innocent Sinner) (1931)
• A Husband's Holiday (1932)
• The Girl in the Studio (1934)
• Martha Brown, MP (1935)
• Jim (1937)

References

• Gail Cunningham: The New Woman and the Victorian Novel (Macmillan: London, 1978).
• Stephanie Forward: s.v. "Victoria Cross(e)". The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, ed. Lorna Sage (CUP: Cambridge, 1999).

Further reading

• Mitchell, Charlotte Victoria Cross (1868-1952): A Bibliography

External links

• Works by Victoria Cross at Project Gutenberg
• The Woman Who Didn't