A mannered grace

"Laura (Riding) Jackson, poet and thinker, is one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American and British literature. She is also one of the most perplexing. With the publication of this long-awaited, authorized biography written by the woman she took into her confidence, Laura (Riding) Jackson can be seen for the first time in a clarifying light." "Thought of primarily as a brilliant poet, (Riding) Jackson was awarded the prestigious Bollingen Prize in 1991, yet, paradoxically, she had renounced the writing of poetry more than forty years earlier. Literary figures such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, and W.H. Auden praised her work and acknowledged her influence. Yet popularly she is known as Robert Graves's collaborator and muse, perhaps even the "White Goddess" of his well-known book of the same name, and as the woman who leapt from a high window out of love or jealousy. This and other episodes of her personal life have been exaggerated, misunderstood, and sensationalized in biographies, memoirs, a novel, and in the public consciousness. Yet she devoted most of her life to Schuyler Jackson, the man she married - once Time magazine's poetry critic - with whom she ran a citrus business while they worked on Rational Meaning, a monumental study of language that she completed after his death and that was finally published after hers." "A Mannered Grace shows the straightforward purpose and intention of Laura (Riding) Jackson's life and work that has eluded so many. In vivid detail, Elizabeth Friedmann recreates the writer and her world - her Socialist family origins in New York, her rise to literary prominence in the 1920s and sojourn in Greenwich Village, her move to England where she began her thirteen-year relationship with Robert Graves, her activism during the Second World War and eventual return to the United States in the summer of 1939 when she and Graves parted, and her final years with Schuyler Jackson - until now largely untold - living in rural Florida, eschewing literary connections, but still writing." "Friedmann discusses (Riding) Jackson's many works within the context of her life, including those co-authored with Graves, and takes us into her diverse circle of friends in New York, London, Paris, and Mallorca that included Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. Most importantly, she reveals what it was like to be a woman of exceptional gifts and scrupulous integrity in the literary world of the 1920s and 1930s - how Laura (Riding) Jackson responded to success and to sometimes insurmountable challenges."--Jacket.