Volume 40, Number 19 · November 18, 1993
The White Goddess!
By Helen Vendler
First Awakenings: The Early Poems of Laura Riding
edited by Elizabeth Friedmann, by Alan J. Clark, by Robert Nye
Persea, 280 pp., $29.95
The Word 'Woman' and Other Related Writings
by Laura (Riding) Jackson, edited by Elizabeth Friedmann, edited by Alan J. Clark
Persea, 211 pp., $29.95
Four Unposted Letters to Catherine
by Laura Riding, afterword by Elizabeth Friedmann, by Alan J. Clark
Persea, 79 pp., $15.00
In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding
by Deborah Baker
Grove Press, 478 pp., $30.00
The reputation of the American poet Laura Riding (1901–1991), hitherto known chiefly as the British writer Robert Graves's companion and 'Muse' in England and on Mallorca, has profited from the feminist search for what are unhappily being called (after Virginia Woolf) 'foremothers.' (The archaism of the word, not to speak of the unmaternal character of most of the women themselves, does not recommend it.) One biography of Riding, whose life had been known chiefly through biographies of Graves, has been issued, and another is in preparation. Even minor bits of Riding's ephemera, like the 1930 Four Unposted Letters to Catherine, are being reissued, together with more substantial collections, such as The Word 'Woman' and Other Related Writings, of which the title essay setting forth Riding's idiosyncratic version of feminism was written between 1933 and 1935. Dominating these peripheral offshoots of what is fast becoming a Riding industry is the reissue of Riding's poems, both the ones published in her lifetime and the recently discovered early poems.
Review, 5924 words
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