Conquest, Joan: Leonie of the Jungle, v1, 22 June 2018
 

"Joan Conquest" (Mary Eliza Louise Cooke, 1883-1941) wrote many fantasy-romance novels, frequently involving the Mystic East.

This novel, "reviewed" by S J Perelman in his "Cloudland Revisited" series of pieces, is the best remembered and probably the most typical. Leonie Hetth, born in India, orphaned as an infant, and brought up in England, reached young womanhood and begins rather hazardous sleepwalking while talking in a strange language, which turns out to be Hindi.

The trail winds back to India, and a crazed Kali-worshipping guru who, from a distance, lures her into his clutches.

The works of Joan Conquest are in the PD in Life plus 70 and Life plus 50 countries, and this book is also in the PD in the USA, having been first published in 1921.

I have used the cover of the original novel, but there is no high-resolution image of the very rare dust jacket to be found, so I have used a low-res image of it as a frontispiece.

EDIT: The second of the two versions of this book is identical to the first except for the cover. The first version's cover turned out to be unsuitable for grey-scale readers such as Kindle . I found a much better version of the same cover which shows up well.