Editing Laura Riding (section)

==Career==
She began to write poetry, publishing first (1923–26) under the name Laura Riding Gottschalk. She became associated with the [[Fugitives (poets)|Fugitives]] through [[Allen Tate]], and they published her poems in ''The Fugitive'' magazine. They awarded her the Nashville Prize in 1924. Her marriage with Gottschalk ended in divorce in 1925, at the end of which year she went to England at the invitation of [[Robert Graves]] and his wife [[Nancy Nicholson]]. She would remain in Europe for nearly 14 years.<ref>Friedman 2005</ref>

The excitement stirred by Laura Riding's poems is hinted at in Sonia Raiziss' later description: "When ''The Fugitive'' (1922–1925) flashed down the new sky of American poetry, it left a brilliant scatter of names: Ransom, Tate, Warren, Riding, Crane.... Among them, the inner circle and those tangent to it as contributors, there was no one quite like Laura Riding." ("An Appreciation," ''Chelsea 12'' 1962, 28.) Riding's first collection of poetry, ''The Close Chaplet'', was published in 1926, and during the following year she assumed the surname Riding.<ref>Clark 2000</ref> By this time the originality of her poetry was becoming ever more evident: generally she favoured a distinctive form of [[free verse]] over conventional metres. She, Robert Graves and [[Nancy Nicholson]] lived in London until Riding's [[suicide attempt]] in 1929. It is generally agreed that this episode was a major cause of the break-up of Graves's first marriage: the whole affair caused a famous literary scandal.

When Riding met the Irish poet, [[Geoffrey Phibbs]], in 1929, she invited him to join the household that already contained herself, Graves, and Graves's wife, Nancy. Phibbs agreed, but after a few months changed his mind and returned to his wife, referring to Riding as "a [[virago]]" in a letter to his friend [[Thomas MacGreevy]].<ref>MacGreevy Papers, [[Trinity College, Dublin]]</ref> When they failed to effect a reconciliation, he rejoined the household but rejected Laura and moved in with Nancy.<ref>{{cite book|author=Niall Carson|title=Rebel by vocation: Seán O'Faoláin and the generation of The Bell|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=GuodDAAAQBAJ&pg=PA107|date=1 February 2016|publisher=Manchester University Press|isbn=978-1-78499-711-3|pages=107}}</ref> This was one of the catalysts for the incident of 27 April 1929, when Riding jumped from a fourth-floor window (or, according to Timothy Sandefur, 2019, “a second-storey window”) at the lodgings she shared with Graves, at the height of an argument involving Graves, Phibbs and Nancy Graves;<ref>{{cite book|author=Jean Moorcroft Wilson|title= Robert Graves: From Great War Poet to ''Good-Bye to All That''|publisher=Bloomsbury|year=2018|pages=352–364|isbn=9781472929143|author-link= Jean Moorcroft Wilson}}</ref> having failed to stop her, Graves also jumped (from a lower floor), but was unharmed, whilst Riding sustained life-threatening injuries.<ref>{{cite book|author=Patrick J. Quinn|title=New Perspectives on Robert Graves|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=a2i-s2GPUkMC&pg=PA41|year=1999|publisher=Susquehanna University Press|isbn=978-1-57591-020-8|pages=41}}</ref>

Following the break-up with Nancy, until the outbreak of the [[Spanish Civil War]] in 1936, Riding and Graves lived in [[Deià]], [[Majorca]], where they were visited by writers and artists including [[James Reeves (writer)|James Reeves]], [[Norman Cameron (poet)|Norman Cameron]], [[John Aldridge (Royal Academician)|John Aldridge]], [[Len Lye]], [[Jacob Bronowski]] and [[Honor Wyatt]]. The house is now a museum.<ref>[http://www.lacasaderobertgraves.com La casa de Robert Graves]</ref>

Riding and Graves were highly productive from the start of their association, though after they moved to Majorca they became even more so. While still in London they had set up (1927) the [[Seizin Press]], collaborated on ''A Survey of Modernist Poetry'' (1927) (which inspired [[William Empson]] to write ''Seven Types of Ambiguity'' and was in some respects the seed of the [[New Criticism]]), ''A Pamphlet Against Anthologies'' (1928) and other works. ''Progress of Stories'' (1935) would later be highly esteemed by, among others, [[John Ashbery]] and [[Harry Mathews]].<ref>See his "Queen Story" in ''Immeasurable Distances: The Collected Essays'', Venice, CA: The Lapis Press, 1991.</ref> In Majorca, the Seizin Press was enlarged to become a publishing imprint, producing ''inter alia'' the substantial hardbound critical magazine ''[[Epilogue (periodical)|Epilogue]]'' (1935–1938), edited by Riding with Graves as associate editor.

[[File:Laura Riding Jackson House - Front view of the house (August 2021).jpg|thumb|Riding on the Mueller campus of Indian River State College in Vero Beach.]]

Graves and Riding left Majorca in 1936, at the outbreak of the [[Spanish Civil War]]. Between 1936 and 1939, Riding and Graves lived in England, France and Switzerland. Throughout their association both steadily produced volumes of major poetry, culminating for each with a ''Collected Poems'' in 1938. In 1939, they moved to the United States and took lodging in [[New Hope, Pennsylvania]]. Their changing relationship is described by Elizabeth Friedmann in ''A Mannered Grace'', by [[Richard Perceval Graves]] in ''Robert Graves: 1927–1940, The Years with Laura'' and by [[T. S. Matthews]] in ''Jacks or Better'' (1977; UK edition published as ''Under the Influence'', 1979) and also was the basis for [[Miranda Seymour]]'s novel ''[[The Summer of '39]]'' (1998). In 1939 Riding and Graves parted and in 1941 she married [[Schuyler B. Jackson]], eventually settling in [[Wabasso, Florida]], where she lived quietly and simply until her death in 1991, Schuyler having died in 1968. The [[Florida cracker architecture|vernacular cracker]] house in which they lived<ref>{{cite book|author=Stuart B McIver|title=Dreamers, Schemers and Scalawags|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=XZhxDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT44|date=1 October 2014|publisher=Pineapple Press|isbn=978-1-56164-750-7|pages=44}}</ref> has been renovated and preserved by the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation at the [[Vero Beach, Florida|Vero Beach]] campus of [[Indian River State College]].<ref>{{cite news |last1=Begley |first1=Janet |title=Historic house of poet Laura Riding Jackson moving by truck from Wabasso to IRSC Vero Beach campus |url=https://www.tcpalm.com/story/news/local/indian-river-county/2019/05/30/poet-laura-riding-jackson-house-vero-beach-moving-indian-river-state-college-campus/3758478002/ |access-date=27 March 2021 |work=[[Treasure Coast]] |date=May 30, 2019}}</ref><ref>{{cite news |last1=Rohlfing Baita |first1=Samantha |title=Laura Riding Jackson house a hit in its college campus location |url=http://www.vb32963online.com/STORIES%202021/AUGUST%202021/VB32963_Laura_Riding_Jackson_House_A_Hit_In_Its_College_Campus_Location_Issue32_081221.html |access-date=13 September 2021 |work=Vero Beach 32963 Media |date=August 12, 2021}}</ref>

According to Graves' biographer [[Richard Perceval Graves]], Riding played a crucial role in the development of Graves' thoughts when writing his book ''[[The White Goddess]]'', despite the fact the two were estranged at that point. Riding Jackson later said, "As to the ‘White Goddess’ identity: the White Goddess theme was a spiritually, literarily and scholastically fraudulent improvisation by Robert Graves into the ornate pretentious framework of which he stuffed stolen substance of my writings, and my thought generally, on poetry, woman, cosmic actualities and the history of religious conceptions."<ref>{{Cite book|title=The person I am : the literary memoirs of Laura (Riding) Jackson, p.70|last=Jackson|first=Laura (Riding)|date=2011|publisher=Trent Editions|others=Nolan, John, 1950-, Friedmann, Carroll Ann.|isbn=9781842331439|location=Nottingham, UK|oclc=773389743}}</ref> She had already written to the Editor of the ''Minnesota Review'', in 1967, about how Graves had used her as a source: "In my thinking, the categorically separated functions termed intellectual, moral, spiritual, emotional, were brought into union, into joint immediacy; other conceptions put the sun and moon in their right rational places as emblems of poetic emotionalism, and lengthened the perspective of Origin back from the skimpy historical heavens of masculine divinity through a spacious dominion of religious symbolism, pre-sided over, for the sake of poetic justice, by a thing I called mother-god."<ref>'A Letter To The Editor' [On Michael Kirkham on Robert Graves], Minnesota Review, 7(l),1967, pp. 77-79. https://www4.ntu.ac.uk/laura_riding/bibliography/letters_to_editors/index.html</ref>

===Renunciation of poetry===
In about 1941, Riding renounced poetry, but it was fifteen to twenty years before she felt able to begin explaining her reasons and exploring her unfolding findings.<ref>Nolan 2007</ref> She withdrew from public literary life, working with Schuyler Jackson on a dictionary (published posthumously in 1997) that would lead them into an exploration of the foundations of meaning and language. In April 1962, she read "Introduction for a Broadcast" for the [[BBC Third Programme]], her first formal statement of her reasons for renouncing poetry (there had been a brief reference book entry in 1955). An expanded version of the piece was published that year in the New York magazine ''[[Chelsea (magazine)|Chelsea]]'', which also published "Further on Poetry" in 1964, writings on the theme of women-and-men in 1965 and 1974 and in 1967, ''The Telling''.

===Later writings===
The 62 numbered passages of ''The Telling'', a "personal evangel", formed the "core part" of a book of the same title, thought by some to be her most important book alongside ''Collected Poems''.<ref>Athlone, 1972; Harper & Row, 1973; Carcanet, 2005.</ref> Writings and publications continued to flow throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties, as Laura (Riding) Jackson (her authorial name from 1963 onwards) explored what she regarded as the truth-potential of language, free from the artificial restrictions of poetic art. "My faith in poetry was at heart a faith in language as the elementary wisdom," she had written in 1976 ("The Road To, In, And Away From, Poetry", ''Reader'' 251). Her later writings attest to what she regarded as the truth-potential contained in language and in the human mind. She might be regarded as a spiritual teacher whose unusually high valuation of language, led her to choose literature as the locus of her work. Two issues of ''Chelsea'' were given over to new writings by her, ''It Has Taken Long'' (1976) and ''The Sufficient Difference'' (2001).

She was awarded the [[Bollingen Prize]] in 1991.<ref>{{Cite web|title=A Mannered Grace|url=https://www4.ntu.ac.uk/laura_riding/books/38530gp.html|access-date=2021-05-02|website=www4.ntu.ac.uk}}</ref>

She died of cardiac arrest on September 2, 1991.<ref>{{Cite news|last=Honan|first=William H.|date=1991-09-04|title=Laura Riding, 90; Poet and Founder Of New Criticism|language=en-US|work=The New York Times|url=https://www.nytimes.com/1991/09/04/arts/laura-riding-90-poet-and-founder-of-new-criticism.html|access-date=2021-05-02|issn=0362-4331}}</ref>