A Mannered Grace
The Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson
Elizabeth Friedmann

This authorized biography of Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) sheds clarifying light on the work of this great modernist and American poet and on the controversies of her personal life that have dominated other biographical accounts. Written by the woman that (Riding) Jackson took into her confidence and with full access to all of her papers, here is the accurate story of (Riding) Jackson’s Socialist family origins in New York, her education and rise to literary prominence in the 1920s and 1930s, her literary circle here and abroad, her 13-year relationship with Robert Graves, her many publications, the small press she ran, her activism in Europe during the Second World War, as well as her return to the U. S. in 1939 when she and Graves parted, her last years in rural Florida—until now largely untold—married to Schuyler Jackson, running a citrus grove, avoiding the publishing world but still writing, and concluding with her death in 1991, only months after she received the prestigious Bollingen Prize for lifetime achievement in poetry.

“Because of its new material, its depth of scholarship, and it first-hand witness from the subject herself, this is the new standard against which other biographies of Jackson will be read.”
—Laurel Blossom, American Book Review

Elizabeth Friedmann met Laura (Riding) Jackson in 1985, after five years of correspondence, and worked with her until her death. She has edited/co-edited many volumes by (Riding) Jackson, including First Awakenings: The Early Poems of Laura Riding, The Word “Woman,” Four Unposted Letters to Catherine, and Chelsea 69, a special issue of later works. She lives in Florida.

Hardcover / $37.50 (Can $54.50) / ISBN 978-0-89255-300-6 / 570 pages / Biography