LITERARY MAYHEM

PERSONAL LETTERS 1971-1980: LAURA (RIDING) JACKSON TO MARK JACOBS
This Personal Selection consists of three main sections: the letters of Laura (Riding) Jackson to Mark Jacobs between 1971 and 1980, a personal visit to Jackson at her home in Wabasso, Florida, and an essay on Jackson and her critics between the late 1950s and 2024.

This book opens fresh perspectives on the life and work of Laura (Riding) Jackson, and takes a significant step toward a just recognition of her large contribution to twentieth-century writing. 
     First, the author’s letters to Mark Jacobs illuminate events after her emergence from the long silence that followed ‘Collected Poems, 1938’.  ‘Selected Poems’, 1970, and the book version of ‘The Telling’ in 1972, which mark the revival of her poetry and her return as a writer of eloquent and searching prose. At the same time, she found her personal and literary reputation under attack. Letters were her way of testing the ground with her correspondents, as Jacobs says, ‘mind to mind’ speaking. As well as the expected clarity of intellect we find great, sometimes overwhelming strength of feeling, as in her violent reaction to a malicious account of the time she fell in love with her husband, Schuyler Jackson.
     There follows Jacobs’ warm and candid memoir, which, like the previously unpublished photograph on the cover, shows the author as full of life and fun. Her physical and intellectual presence, her voice, her ‘cracker’ house, her relations with friends and neighbours are vividly evoked.
     Finally, the essay ‘Literary Mayhem’ has a shocking story to tell. It expands on the theme of Jacobs’ ‘Contemporary Misogyny’ (2015) which exposed the mendacious refusal of  William Empson, abetted by Robert Graves and others, to acknowledge Riding as the lead author of ‘A Survey of Modernist Poetry’, and, in particular, of the analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, which inspired Empson’s ‘Seven Types of Ambiguity’.
     ‘Literary Mayhem’ tells how, ignoring Graves’ self-declared dependence on her and her ideas and work, most scholars minimise the effect her work had on his poetry. This despite the fact that Michael Kirkham, author of the first book on Graves’ poetry, subsequently discovered and detailed the extent of his dependence on Riding’s thought, concluding that she, not he, was the major poet. As Jacobs shows, Graves’ appropriation of Riding’s work for his own career continued even after their partnership dissolved in 1940.  Most staggering is the revelation, from detective work by Margaret Konkol, that before selling his poetic manuscripts to academic institutions, Graves carefully erased annotations made by Riding and then rewrote them as his own.

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