Laura Riding

-
Standard Name: Riding, Laura
Birth Name: Laura Reichenthal
Married Name: Laura Gottschalk
Self-constructed Name: Laura Riding Gottschalk
Self-constructed Name: Laura Riding
Pseudonym: Madeleine Vara
Married Name: Laura Jackson
Indexed Name: Laura Riding Jackson
Self-constructed Name: Laura (Riding) Jackson
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.

Connections

No connections available.

Timeline

No timeline events available.

Texts

Riding, Laura. The Telling. Athlone Press, 1972.
Riding, Laura. The Word ’Woman’ and Other Related Writings. Editors Friedmann, Elizabeth and Alan J. Clark, Persea Books, 1993.
Riding, Laura. Though Gently. Seizin Press, 1930.
Riding, Laura. Twenty Poems Less. Hours Press, 1930.
Riding, Laura. Under the Mind’s Watch. Editors Nolan, John and Alan J. Clark, Peter Lang, 2004.
Riding, Laura. Voltaire: A Biographical Fantasy. Hogarth Press, 1927.