Laura (Riding) Jackson

Briefly—Mark Jacobs

My principle interest is Laura Riding’s work, and her place in twentieth century literature more generally, which I began in the 1960s, and then as an English undergraduate student at York University.

I undertook a PhD on Laura (Riding) Jackson under the poet and critic G.S. Fraser at Leicester University, and was given a doctorate in 1976, examined by Professor Edwin Morgan. During this period I published a book of my own poetry and founded and edited the poetry magazine, Omens (1970-3).

In 1972 I entered into a correspondence with Laura (Riding) Jackson which lasted until 1990. The correspondence is held in the Nottingham Trent University archive, available at https://www4.ntu.ac.uk/laura_riding/archive/index.html.

In 1979, I gained a Leverhulme Fellowship, awarded to add biographic detail to this book.

1979-98: Special needs teacher part-time; English Communications Lecturer, Nottingham Trent University, 1985-9.

Appointed Member of the Laura (Riding) Jackson Board of Literary Management from 1997 until it was wound up under the terms of the author’s Will in 2010 and passed to Cornell University.

Chosen by the board to write the introduction to the centennial edition of Laura Riding’s Collected Poems (New York: Persea Books, 2001).

Fellow of the English Department at Nottingham Trent University in 2008, where I created and still maintain the Laura (Riding) Jackson website, https://lauraridingjackson.org.uk, founded the Laura (Riding) Jackson library archive, and appointed Laura (Riding) Series Editor for Trent Editions, the publishing house for Nottingham Trent University’s English Department, which has seen the publication of the two volumes of The Person I Am, by Laura (Riding) Jackson, edited by Carroll Ann Friedmann and John Nolan, in 2011; and four new editions of her poems, each with a substantial introduction, of the most important early collections of Laura Riding’s poems:

• The Close Chaplet by Laura Riding edited and with an introduction by Mark Jacobs, 2018; also published with Ugly Duckling Presse

• Love As Love, Death As Death by Laura Riding edited and with an introduction by Jack Blackmore, 2018

• Poet: A Lying Word by Laura Riding edited and with an introduction by Jack Blackmore, 2017

• Poems: A Joking Word by Laura Riding edited and with an introduction by Jack Blackmore, 2020

• The Person I Am by Laura (Riding) Jackson, 2 vols.edited by John Nolan and Carroll Ann Friedmann, 2011

A fifth volume of selected letters between 1971 and 1980 to me is in final process.

Other relevant publications include:

• ‘The Question of Bias: Some Treatments of Laura (Riding) Jackson’, Mark Jacobs and Alan Clark, Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature, Vol 21, Nos 1 and 2, 1971, 1-29;

• ‘Rewriting History, Literally: Laura Riding’s The Close Chaplet’, Gravesiana, Vol 3, No 3, Summer 2012;

• ‘Contemporary Misogyny: Laura Riding, William Empson and the Critics—A Survey of Mis-History’, English, Oxford University Press, 2015, Vol 64, No 246, pp. 222-240

• ‘A Journey to Wabasso’, memoir of my visit to Laura (Riding) Jackson at her Florida home in 1978

• ‘September Surprise’ TES, 11 January 2002, https://www.tes.com/news/september-surprise

I have published variously elsewhere.