Laura (Riding) Jackson
Series Editor: Mark Jacobs
Appointed as an English Fellow in 2008 at Nottingham Trent University, I donated my personal collection of letters from Laura Jackson of some fifteen years between 1971 and 1985, plus other documents she confided to me, plus books, to the Trent University Archive which was set up specifically for the purpose. Her name, after 1940 when she returned to America after breaking up with
Robert Graves, and her subsequent marriage to Schuyler B. Jackson, became Laura (Riding) Jackson. At her home in Wabasso, Florida, she was known in the village simply as ‘Mrs. Jackson.’
I agreed with Trent University to edit and re-publish eight books of which six have appeared as listed below:
The Person I Am by Laura (Riding) Jackson, 2 vols.
edited by John Nolan and Carroll Ann Friedmann, 2011
The Close Chaplet by Laura Riding, edited and with an introduction by Mark Jacobs 2018
Poet: A Lying Word by Laura Riding
edited and with an introduction by Jack Blackmore, 2017
Love As Love, Death As Death by Laura Riding 2019
edited and with an introduction by Jack Blackmore, 2017
Poems A Joking Word by Laura Riding, 2020
edited and with an introduction by Jack Blackmore, 2017
Two more have yet to appear, the next one a selection of her letters, the final one to be a selection of her essays taken from her three volumes of Epilogue (1935-1937). Each of the now rare Epilogue volumes were produced in hard-back format and comprised 250 pages or so. They included essays by friends of the time such as Robert Graves, or others who visited her at her home in Deya, Majorca, such as James Reeves, T. S. Matthews, Harry Kemp, Jacob Bronowski, Alan Hodge and Len Lye. All the essays were written in collaboration with her. Details of Epilogue and be found in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (editors Brooker and Thacker, 2009).