Joan Conquest (1883-1941) is the pseudonym of UK author Mary Eliza Louise Cooke (Mrs Leonard Cooke), born Mary Eliza Gripper and also known as Sister Martin-Nicholson following her...view moreJoan Conquest (1883-1941) is the pseudonym of UK author Mary Eliza Louise Cooke (Mrs Leonard Cooke), born Mary Eliza Gripper and also known as Sister Martin-Nicholson following her first, brief marriage in 1907 to Allen Martin Reuben Nicholson (1883-1915); she married Leonard Cooke in 1915. She is known for floridly euphemistic (though superficially daring) novels of high romance, typical of which are Leonie of the Jungle (1921), whose eponymous heroine escapes the Hypnotic thrall of the goddess Kali in the nick of time, and Love's Curse (1936), in which the spirit of an Egyptian pharaoh curses two twentieth-century lovers; this novel, part of the loose Lost Cohort sequence which is otherwise non-fantastic, is typical of the cod-Egyptian mystificationsview less