Literary Mayhem
Selected Letters 1971-1980
Laura (Riding) Jackson to Mark Jacobs
Hardback: £25.00
Royal size 234mmx156mm
Pages 288
4 illustrations
Kingfisher Blue cloth bound
Dust jacket
ISBN 978-1-7384620-0-8
Concur Books, UK
Paperback £14.99
A5 size
Pages 276
4 illustrations
ISBN:978-1-7384620-0-1
Concur Books, UK
Includes: 'A Journey to Wabasso 32970, Florida' and 'Literary Mayhem: a history of critical misogyny'
This book gives us welcome new perspectives on the life and work of Laura (Riding) Jackson.
The author's letters to Mark Jacobs provide a window into an important decade. Publication of Selected Poems in1970 and of the book version of The Telling in 1972 had marked the revival of her poetry and her re-emergence as a writer of searching and eloquent prose, after decades of relative silence following the publication of her Collected Poems, 1938.
In the early 1970s Jacobs was studying Laura Riding’s poetry for a doctorate, under G.S. Fraser. His work on this, and on a joint essay with Alan J. Clark, exposing the misrepresentation of her work, forms the ‘business’ background to the correspondence here.
Her letters are instinct with intensity of scrutiny, acuity of intellect, and delicate scrupulosity. But there is also great, sometimes overwhelming strength of feeling. She starts off guardedly, but feelings of love develop and are expressed, for Jacobs and for others of her correspondents. This is her most precious currency; but she is so alive to slights and failings of every kind, that those feelings of love may flicker and change, as they do with several people mentioned, sometimes to re-emerge as strongly as before. The wounds from her mistreatment by Graves and his supporters after he and she split up in 1940 are evident and her violent reaction to a malicious account of the time she fell in love with her husband, Schuyler, is described here.
Complementing the letters are Jacobs’ vividly warm memoir of a visit to the author in 1978 and the essay referred to above, revised and updated. The memoir, like the previously unpublished photograph on the cover, shows the author as rarely seen before, full of fun and life. The forthright essay exposing the poisonous misrepresentation of Laura (Riding) Jackson as a person and as a writer by Graves and his followers makes a significant step towards a just recognition of her large contribution to twentieth century writing.
Jack Blackmore, November 2023