A Mannered Grace: The Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson - Hardcover

Friedmann, Elizabeth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0892553006 ISBN 13: 9780892553006

Publisher: Persea, 2005

Synopsis

A decade in the making and eagerly anticipated, here is the authorized biography, written by the woman Laura (Riding) Jackson took into her confidence. Elizabeth Friedmann met Laura (Riding) Jackson in 1985, after five years of correspondence, and worked with her until her death in 1991. From the vantage point of a close friend and with access to all of (Riding) Jackson's papers, Friedmann now sheds new light on the life and work of one of the most important yet perplexing figures in American and British literary history. With fascinating detail, Friedmann recreates the writer and her world. We share a young Laura's excitement when, in the early 1920s, her poems attract the attention of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. We recognize her sense of destiny when she goes to England and begins her productive collaboration with Robert Graves. Friedmann shows the life and world circumstances that led to such historic works as A Survey of Modernist Poetry (written with Graves) and the Collected Poems of 1938. She takes us into Laura's diverse circle of associates that included Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. So intimate is this portrait that the "scandals" of (Riding) Jackson's personal and professional lifeher "three-life" with Graves and Nancy Nicholson, her attempted suicide, her role in the breakup of Schuyler Jackson's first marriage, and her renunciation of poetryare demystified, put into perspective, made understandable. Friedmann shows that (Riding) Jackson was not a divided woman, as some have said. Rather, she maintained a "mannered grace" and possessed an inner consistency of thought and purpose. Beautifully written, fair-minded, and compassionate, A Mannered Grace humanizes a complex and often demonized figure, and allows for a reassessment of her remarkable achievement.

About this title

About the Author

Elizabeth Friedmann co-edited First Awakenings: The Early Poems of Laura Riding with Alan J. Clark and Robert Nye, Laura (Riding) Jackson's The Word "Woman," and Four Unposted Letters to Catherine with Alan J. Clark. She was guest editor of Chelsea 69 (2000), a special issue devoted entirely to Laura (Riding) Jackson's later works, and she has published articles on (Riding) Jackson in the United States, England and Brazil. She lives in Florida.

Reviews

"Few writers have been so highly praised and fiercely damned as Laura (Riding) Jackson," writes Friedmann in the introduction to this dense and somewhat disjointed biography. Certainly, Jackson is a complex subject. The "muse" of Robert Graves for 14 years, she was also an accomplished poet in her own right, and her work has been admired by the likes of W.H. Auden, Robert Fitzgerald, John Asbury and Ted Hughes. Others have denounced her as a "witch" and a "megalomaniac" who destroyed the Graves's family without compunction. Drawing on an extensive collection of Jackson's manuscripts, letters and papers, Friedmann produces an admiring account of Jackson's dispassionate first marriage, her development as a poet during the 1920s, her "marriage of three" with Graves and his wife, her attempt to commit suicide when the "marriage" imploded, her life with Graves in Majorca and her eventual decision to leave him so that she could marry a freshly divorced intellectual named Schuyler Jackson. The biography is peppered with excerpts from Jackson's prolific correspondence with other writers, among them Gertrude Stein and Robert Penn Warren. Remarkably, nearly every friendship and correspondence ends with an argument and, sometimes, legal action as well. "The intensity of Laura Riding's personal presence and the concentrated focus of her keen intelligence were a magnetic combination, both attracting and repelling," Friedmann explains. Indeed, despite Friedmann's best intentions, Jackson comes off as a shrill and fickle presence who wrote torrents of bitter letters that offended all. The sheer length of the volume-and the confusing tumult of the life it contains-may deter readers not already riveted by Jackson's personal travails. And Friedmann spends so much time detailing Jackson's private dramas that she neglects to illuminate the poetic excellence that was clearly her most admirable trait. 16 pages photos.
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In order to gain greater understanding of the controversial poet and literary thinker Laura Riding Jackson, Friedmann worked closely with this distinctive woman of letters until the poet's death at age 90 in 1991. Praised by many as an important literary figure and damned by others as a scandalous, home-wrecking witch, Jackson, says Friedmann, was the first contemporary woman to neither dismiss nor emphasize gender differences, but to identify them through words and action, and attempt to reconcile them. Jackson immersed herself in the poetry of the English Romantics, studied at Cornell, and found kindred literary spirits in Greenwich Village and in England. She began writing as Laura Riding, embarked on a tempestuous and now infamous relationship with writer Robert Graves, then abruptly left the literary scene for life in Florida with poetry critic Schuyler Jackson. With a no-holds-barred approach to Jackson's personal life, and the establishment of a multidimensional context for her work, Friedmann has crafted a solid biography that will enhance women's studies as well as literary collections. Whitney Scott
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Persea
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0892553006
• ISBN 13: 9780892553006
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 571