LibGuides: Brackett Preservation Lab: Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation Collection

Laura (Riding) Jackson Foundation

About Laura (Riding) Jackson

Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) was a poet, essayist, novelist, critic, and writer of short fiction. She is best known for her avant-garde poetry and unconventional personal life including a twelve-year relationship with the English writer Robert Graves (McIver 15).

She was born Laura Reichenthal in New York City on January 16, 1901 and attended Cornell University on scholarship (McIver 16). While at Cornell, she married Louis Gottschalk and began writing under the pseudonym Laura Riding. Her poetry was praised by the Fugitives, a group of Southern poets centered around Vanderbilt University who published their own very influential literary journal by the same name. They published her poetry in The Fugitive and awarded her Nashville Poetry Prize in 1924 (“Riding, Laura (1901-1991)”).

In 1925, her marriage with Louis ended and Laura briefly moved to New York City. She began to correspond with the English poet Robert Graves who had praised her writing in a 1925 essay. He invited Laura to collaborate with him so she then traveled to the United Kingdom to meet him and his wife in 1926 (“Riding, Laura (1901-1991)”). The three of them began a relationship which lasted for 12 years that Laura referred to as "three-life". Laura and Graves were very prolific during this time period, writing separately and together as well as editing the journal Epilogue, and publishing books through their small press, Seizin Press (“Laura Riding Jackson”). Laura was close friends with modernist American writer and fellow big personality Gertrude Stein (McIver 15). In 1929, Laura attempted suicide following an explosive argument with Geoffrey Phibbs, an Irish poet who had joined her relationship with Robert and Nancy Graves. The incident was investigated but ultimately nobody faced punishment (McIver). Laura and Graves lived in Majorca, Spain for a period after the location was suggested to them by Stein. They were friendly with artists and writers, often hosting them in their home in Majorca. In 1938, Schuyler Jackson, a poetry critic with Time Magazine, favorably reviewed Laura's work.

Laura returned to America and brought Graves with her. She met Schuyler Jackson through their mutual friend, T.S. Matthews, the editor of Time Magazine. Laura and Schuyler began a relationship. Graves returned to England without Laura and in 1941, Schuyler and Laura married. In 1943, they purchased a citrus grove with a cracker house on the land in Wabasso, FL where they lived until their deaths. Upon returning to America, Laura renounced poetry. She collaborated with her husband on a project about the meanings of words. Schuyler died in 1968 but Laura did complete their book called Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words which was published after her death. Laura took care of the home and cooking meals and, while she never returned to poetry, continued to write nonfiction (McIver 23). Her accomplishments include the Mark Rothko Appreciation Award which she was awarded in 1971, a National Endowment for the Arts fellowship awarded in 1979, and Yale University's Bollingen Prize for her lifetime contribution to poetry awarded in 1991 (“Laura Riding Jackson”). Riding Jackson died on Labor Day in 1991 at ninety years old (McIver 15). She is buried next to her second husband at Winter Beach Cemetery (McIver 16).

Works Cited

“Laura Riding Jackson.” Poets.org, poets.org/poet/laura-riding-jackson.

McIver, Stuart B. "The Muse of Indian River the Inscrutable Laura Riding -- Poet, Femme Fatale and Lover to the Famous Writer Robert Graves -- Spent the Last 50 Years of Her Life in a Tiny Florida Citrus Town." Sun-Sentinel, 23 May 1993, www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1993-05-23-9302130372-story.html.

McIver, Stuart B. "Poet in a Citrus Grove." Dreamers, Schemers, and Scalawags: The Florida Chronicles, vol. 1, Pineapple Press, 1994, pp. 15-24.

“Riding, Laura (1901-1991).” Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia, Gale Research, 2002, Encyclopedia.com, www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/riding-laura-1901-1991.

Laura Riding Jackson Books at the Brackett Library

The Failure of Poetry, the Promise of Language by John Nolan (Editor); Laura Jackson
ISBN: 9780472069576
Publication Date: 2007-05-22
A volume in the Poets on Poetry series, which collects critical works by contemporary poets, gathering together the articles, interviews, and book reviews by which they have articulated the poetics of a new generation. In The Failure of Poetry, The Promise of Language, Laura (Riding) Jackson examines the subjects of poetry, language, and truth; the conflict between truth and art; and the range of human attitudes to the prospect of truth-speaking. Also included are a series of comments on and judgments of the poets Coleridge, Clare, Eliot, Frost, Vachel Lindsay, Lowell, Pound, Dylan Thomas, and W. C. Williams and selections from her correspondence ranging from 1948 to 1984. Laura (Riding) Jackson's first published poems appeared in 1923 in magazines such as The Fugitive. In 1925 she moved to England, and during thirteen years abroad wrote some twenty books of poetry, criticism, and fiction. In 1941 she renounced poetry, married Schuyler B. Jackson, and collaborated with him on what would become Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words. The Telling, her spiritual testament, was published in 1972. In 1991 she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for her lifetime contribution to poetry. She died on September 2, 1991. John Nolan is a member of the Laura (Riding) Jackson Board of Literary Management, and co-editor, with Alan J. Clark, of Laura (Riding) Jackson's Under the Mind's Watch (2004). He lives in London, England.
Essays from Epilogue by Laura Riding; Robert Graves; Mark Jacobs (Introduction by)
ISBN: 9781857545180
Publication Date: 2001-10-01
The Epilogue essays, published when the literary partnership of Laura Riding and Robert Graves was at its height, illustrate their working relationship and the background to their later very different careers.
The Poems of Laura Riding by Laura (Riding) Jackson; Mark Jacobs (Foreword by)
ISBN: 9780892552580
Publication Date: 2001-08-01
Anarchism Is Not Enough by Laura Riding; Lisa Samuels (Editor, Introduction by)
ISBN: 9780520213944
Publication Date: 2001-05-07
Anarchism is Not Enough is a manifesto against systematic thinking, a difficult book by a famously difficult writer. For the scope of its critical imagination, it is the most radical work of Laura Riding's early period. This period extends from the end of 1925, when she left America for Europe and Robert Graves, to 1939, the year she returned to America, renounced any further writing of poetry, and soon after married Schuyler Jackson. Published in 1928, when Riding was twenty-seven, Anarchism is a kind of early autobiographia literaria. Long out of print and now available for the first time in paperback, this is one of the most imaginative and daring works of literary theory ever written by a modernist figure. Lisa Samuels's edition sets the work in its historical context and elucidates its central intellectual difficulties. Her introduction and notes are a valuable aid to an understanding of Riding's work.
Experts Are Puzzled by Laura Riding; George Fragopoulos (Editor)
ISBN: 9781937027865
Publication Date: 2018-05-01
A nearly impossible text to categorize - is it a collection of short stories, prose poems, manifestos or something else entirely? - Experts Are Puzzled is one of Laura Riding's earliest and most intense examinations of poetry's and language's relationship to truth. In essayistic examinations such as the titular piece, "Introduction to a Book on Money," and "An Address to America," Riding seeks to articulate a higher, more poetic notion of truth and truth telling. As such, Experts Are Puzzled stands as an essential text for understanding why Riding came to reject poetry in the late 1930s. While excerpts and selections from Experts have been published before, most notably in Riding's The Progress of Stories, the entirety of the collection has not appeared in print since its initial publication by Jonathan Cape in 1930.
Laura Riding Jackson Reader by Laura (Riding) Jackson; Elizabeth Friedman (Foreword by); Elizabeth Friedmann
ISBN: 9780892552634
Publication Date: 2004-08-01
A rich cross-section of the modernist poet and critic's work from 1923 to 1987.
Laura Riding by Laura (Riding) Jackson
ISBN: 9780892551897
Publication Date: 1993-03-01
In Extremis by Deborah Baker
ISBN: 9780595140411
Publication Date: 2000-11-07
In Extremis is hte first major biography of a major 20th century modernist.
Mannered Grace by Elizabeth Friedmann
ISBN: 9780892553006
Publication Date: 2005-02-17
A decade in the making and eagerly anticipated, here is the authorized biography, written by the woman Laura (Riding) Jackson took into her confidence. Elizabeth Friedmann met Laura (Riding) Jackson in 1985, after five years of correspondence, and worked with her until her death in 1991. From the vantage point of a close friend and with access to all of (Riding) Jackson's papers, Friedmann now sheds new light on the life and work of one of the most important yet perplexing figures in American and British literary history. With fascinating detail, Friedmann recreates the writer and her world. We share a young Laura's excitement when, in the early 1920s, her poems attract the attention of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. We recognize her sense of destiny when she goes to England and begins her productive collaboration with Robert Graves. Friedmann shows the life and world circumstances that led to such historic works as A Survey of Modernist Poetry (written with Graves) and the Collected Poems of 1938. She takes us into Laura's diverse circle of associates that included Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. So intimate is this portrait that the "scandals" of (Riding) Jackson's personal and professional lifeher "three-life" with Graves and Nancy Nicholson, her attempted suicide, her role in the breakup of Schuyler Jackson's first marriage, and her renunciation of poetryare demystified, put into perspective, made understandable. Friedmann shows that (Riding) Jackson was not a divided woman, as some have said. Rather, she maintained a "mannered grace" and possessed an inner consistency of thought and purpose. Beautifully written, fair-minded, and compassionate, A Mannered Grace humanizes a complex and often demonized figure, and allows for a reassessment of her remarkable achievement.