A Mannered Grace: The Life of Laura (Riding) Jackson

by Elizabeth Friedmann

A decade in the making and eagerly anticipated, here is the authorized biography, written by the woman Laura (Riding) Jackson took into her confidence. Elizabeth Friedmann met Laura (Riding) Jackson in 1985, after five years of correspondence, and worked with her until her death in 1991. From the vantage point of a close friend and with access to all of (Riding) Jackson's papers, Friedmann now sheds new light on the life and work of one of the most important yet perplexing figures in American and British literary history. With fascinating detail, Friedmann recreates the writer and her world. We share a young Laura's excitement when, in the early 1920s, her poems attract the attention of John Crowe Ransom and Allen Tate. We recognize her sense of destiny when she goes to England and begins her productive collaboration with Robert Graves. Friedmann shows the life and world circumstances that led to such historic works as A Survey of Modernist Poetry (written with Graves) and the Collected Poems of 1938. She takes us into Laura's diverse circle of associates that included Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf. So intimate is this portrait that the "scandals" of (Riding) Jackson's personal and professional lifeher "three-life" with Graves and Nancy Nicholson, her attempted suicide, her role in the breakup of Schuyler Jackson's first marriage, and her renunciation of poetryare demystified, put into perspective, made understandable. Friedmann shows that (Riding) Jackson was not a divided woman, as some have said. Rather, she maintained a "mannered grace" and possessed an inner consistency of thought and purpose. Beautifully written, fair-minded, and compassionate, A Mannered Grace humanizes a complex and often demonized figure, and allows for a reassessment of her remarkable achievement.

Genres: Biography

571 pages, Hardcover

First published January 3, 2005

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Friedmann's biography had really paltry critical attention when it appeared in 2005, though H.L. Hix reviewed it sympathetically in the magazine I helped edit, Delmar 11. This goes to show, says I, that fifteen years before, when Deborah Baker made her first approach to (Riding) Jackson, and L(R)J, in turning her aside, began to make arrangements with her then-friend Elizabeth Friedmann to carry out a biography, the publishing industry was not about to show any patience of its own. So we have the publishing industry debacle that Baker's hatchet job remains the biography most folks on this site seem to be (or have been) reading. Friedmann's biography is far superior. It is sympathetic, yes, and it is well-researched, and has tracked down many of the loose ends of scholarly speculation. It shows what is finally a heroic life, just as Carolyn Burke showed us a Mina Loy who however poor when she died had lived a life committed to art. L(R)J's ultimate commitment was, as Friedmann shows, to language, and to the role of the poet in being words' caretaker. Friedmann has found a 1938 poem Riding wrote after she had put together her 1938 Collected; she has put together a life that had poetry as its center long after L(R)J had made a carefully thought-through renunciation of poetry, as she saw it being practiced. This is a significant book.