Laura Riding Jackson (born Laura Reichenthal; January 16, 1901 – September 2, 1991), best known as Laura Riding, was an American poet, critic, novelist, essayist and short story writer.
Early life
She was born in New York City to Nathaniel Reichenthal, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia, and Sadie (née Edersheim), and educated at Cornell University. She met historian Louis R. Gottschalk, then a graduate assistant at Cornell, and they married in 1920. She began to write poetry, publishing first (1923–26) under the name Laura Riding Gottschalk. She became associated with the 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 fourteen years.
Poetic development and personal relationships
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. 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. When they failed to effect a reconciliation, he rejoined the household but rejected Laura and moved in with Nancy. 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; having failed to stop her, Graves also jumped (from a lower floor), but was unharmed, whilst Riding sustained life-threatening injuries.
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, Norman Cameron, John Aldridge, Len Lye, Jacob Bronowski and Honor Wyatt. The house is now a museum.
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. In Majorca, the Seizin Press was enlarged to become a publishing imprint, producing inter alia the substantial hardbound critical magazine Epilogue (1935–1938), edited by Riding with Graves as associate editor.