Four Unposted Letters To Catherine
Laura Riding

Like Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, this remarkable little book of wisdom and advice refreshes the mind and renews the spirit. Written in 1930 and published in Paris in a limited edition, these letters were addressed to an eight-year-old girl, the “thoughtful and sensible” child of Nancy Nicholson and Robert Graves. But they were also meant for adults who might have such a child in their spirit.
In simple, luminous language, Laura Riding explains the difference between learning and knowing; the value of thinking, of doing, and of not-showing-off; and how it is good to live straight, avoiding the hypocrisies and pretensions of “the muddle.”
Here is a literary treasure to be shared between generations. 

“...a small, miraculous book... With great simplicity and unpretentious sincerity, both comprehensible and enchanting as much to this particular little girl as to any child or even any wakeful grownup at all, Riding addresses some of the most elemental questions of existence — how to live a life of creativity and integrity, why praise and prestige are corrosive objects of success, and above all what it means to be oneself.”
—Maria Popova, Brain Pickings

Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991) is the author of more than forty books of poetry, criticism, and story. In 1991, just months prior to her death, she was awarded the Bollingen Prize for lifelong service to poetry.

Hardcover / $16.95 (Can $22.95) / ISBN 978-0-89255-192-7 / 80 pages / Literature