Laura Riding

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LR , an American who spent crucial years of her astonishingly productive life in England and Europe, was an important modernist poet, critic, and theorist, who regarded her poetry as a tool in the search for truth. One of the remarkable features in her career was her capacity to inspire and energise other writers to contribute to her large-scale collaborative projects: a kind of encyclopaedia, a periodical, an unusual dictionary. Generally oppositional, unconcerned about being out of step with most avant-garde opinion, she maintained her own viewpoint tenaciously as the only correct one, and claimed to have influenced and been borrowed from by many of the most distinguished names of her generation. She refused to let her work appear in all-women contexts. When she lost confidence in poetry as a vehicle for the truth (moving instead towards aspects of the study of language), she almost entirely gave up writing it, and allowed reprinting of her own earlier work only with prefatory material to explain her new and different position.
  • BirthName: Laura Reichenthal
  • Self-constructed: Laura Riding Gottschalk
    She chose this after her first marriage as her writing name, with Riding displacing Reichenthal. Her first husband thanked her as Laura Riding Gottschalk in his first book.
    Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
    30, 38
    ; Laura Riding
    She began to write as Laura Riding (instead of Laura Riding Gottschalk) after a visit in England from her ex-husband in summer 1926, and changed her name by deed-poll to this version at the end of 1927, though the change came legally into effect only the next year.
    Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
    91, 111
    ; Laura (Riding) Jackson
    In 1963 she asked an Italian magazine to print her name as Laura Jackson Riding, then altered her request to Laura [Riding] Jackson. The magazine used Laura (Riding) Jackson and she later settled on this form herself.
    Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
    402
  • Married: Gottschalk; Jackson
  • Pseudonym: Madeleine Vara
  • Indexed: Laura Riding Jackson

Milestones

16 January 1901

LR was born as Laura Reichenthal in New York City, the elder child of her father and his second wife: her given name was that of his first wife, who had died young of tuberculosis.
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
10

October 1972

LR published The Telling, dedicated to her parents; she advised the Athlone Press in great detail about its overall design.
Wexler, Joyce Piell. Laura Riding: A Bibliography. Garland, 1981.
80
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
17, 427

2 September 1991

LR died in Sebastian, Florida, from a heart attack.
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
461

Biography

Birth and Influences

16 January 1901

LR was born as Laura Reichenthal in New York City, the elder child of her father and his second wife: her given name was that of his first wife, who had died young of tuberculosis.
Friedmann, Elizabeth. A Mannered Grace. Persea Books, 2005.
10