Selected Letters of
Laura (Riding) Jackson
to
Mark Jacobs
1971 to 1980
Literary Mayhem is a personal account between Laura Jackson and Mark Jacobs over ten years of literary mis-trearment, mis-history, misogyny, of the period between 1923 and 1981 accorded to the author, Laura Jackson, both when she was a poet and after 1940 and her renouncement of poetry:
“For truth to be become a thing of the present, poetry must become a thing of the past.” [Preface to Selected Poems, Faber 1970]Bizarrely, Robert Graves became her chief detractor, largely because he based his major work on her work. The White Goddess, for instance, is drawn from her poems and essays, relying on them both textually, for details, and generally for their thought on the subject of woman and God. His and Alan Hodges’ book, The Reader Over Your Shoulder, is taken from one of her many essays of the 1930s, as was The Long Weekend, while his critical output in the Cambridge and Oxford Lecturers and elsewhere are coincident at every point with all she put out between 1935 and 1939. It should be noted here that the famous A Survey of Modernist Poetry, 1927, a source of the ‘New Criticism’, has frequently been cited by critics (and scholars) as by Graves, but was, in fact and detail, by her in all its major and minor parts, and based on her book of criticism, Contemporaries and Snobs.