In Extremis: The Life of Laura Riding

by Deborah Baker, Laura (Riding) Jackson (Subject)

In her poetry, fiction, essays, and public statements, Laura Riding, the author of twenty-three books, tackled feminism, communism, sexuality, Freud, language and belief, and the coming-of-age of the American dream. In her personal relationships she was often at the center of a circle of friends and artists whose activities she inspired and sometimes controlled. Her extraordinary range of associates included writers as diverse as Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Allen Tate, and Robert Penn Warren. During a long and "scandalous" affair with Robert Graves, she watched over his most productive period and guided much of his best work. Together they launched the New Criticism.

Genres: Biography, Poetry

508 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 1992

About the author

Deborah Baker was born in Charlottesville and grew up in Virginia, Puerto Rico and New England. She attended the University of Virginia and Cambridge University. Her first biography, written in college, was Making a Farm: The Life of Robert Bly, published by Beacon Press in 1982.

After working a number of years as a book editor and publisher, in 1990 she moved to Calcutta where she wrote In Extremis; The Life of Laura Riding. Published by Grove Press and Hamish Hamilton in the UK, it was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize in Biography in 1994. Her third book, A Blue Hand: The Beats in India was published by Penguin Press USA and Penguin India in 2008.

In 2008–2009 she was a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis C. Cullman Center for Writers and Scholars at The New York Public Library. There she researched and wrote The Convert: A Tale of Exile and Extremism, a narrative account of the life of an American convert to Islam, drawn on letters on deposit in the library’s manuscript division. The Convert, published by Graywolf and Penguin India, was a finalist for the 2011 National Book Award in Non-Fiction.

In August 2018, she published her fifth work of non-fiction, The Last Englishmen: Love, War and the End of Empire.

She has two children and is married to the writer Amitav Ghosh. They divide their time between Brooklyn and Goa.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 2 out of 5]

Deborah Baker's In Extremis covers the life of the writer Laura (Riding) Jackson only up to her May 1939 trip to The United States, to visit with some friends the Schuyler Jackson family in Bucks County. (Jackson [b. 1901] died in 1991.) An important trip, because for twelve years Riding (as she then was) had lived with Robert Graves, and the result of the trip would be the recombining of the Jackson/Alan Hodge-Beryl Hodge/Riding-Graves couples, and along permanent lines. Baker's account of this trip, in the chapter, "New Hope," is deeply flawed -- Baker relies overmuch on sources ill-disposed to treat Riding fairly (Schuyler Jackson's first wife, Kit Jackson; Griselda Ohannessian; Martin Seymour-Smith), and affords little effort to treat with skepticism hearsay, and worse, gossip. It's clear that what has been endeavored biographically has as its motive the rough one of getting a job done, to the sacrifice of the biographer's service to her subject.

[Tara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read about this biography in passing somewhere and was excited to discover it existed because I've wanted to read more about this strange poet ever since I read John Ashbery's "Other Traditions," in which he chose her as one of six poets out of the mainstream to discuss. (That's a great little book, by the way.) One surprising revelation: Laura Riding was perhaps the driving force behind the development of New Criticism, though she's almost never given credit for it. This was an engaging biography, though one comes to detest the subject after a while.

[Yuliana]

While I was in awe of her single mindedness where her poetry was concerned, the impact of her narcissism was beyond comprehension. I acknowledge her relevance in modern poetry.

[Sara]

1994 finalist