Literary Mayhem: Personal Letters 1971-1980

The well-known scholar Mark Jacobs has devoted nearly sixty years to defending the reputation of Laura (Riding) Jackson and promoting her work. His knowledge of her work, and of scholarship in connection with it, are without parallel. He has worked tirelessly with others interested in her work, giving generous support and encouragement to many. This book, in three sections, the letters, a memoir and the essay that provides the book with its title, gives us welcome fresh perspectives on Laura Jackson’s extraordinary life and work.

At its core the story this book has to tell is a shocking one. As a rule, we can expect integrity of our writers and scholars, however much personal animosity there may be. In the case of Laura (Riding) Jackson, for reasons which are sometimes obvious, sometimes obscure, her reputation has been undermined and damaged by some extraordinary behaviour by Robert Graves and some of his followers. Jacobs marshals the evidence; perhaps the most staggering and symbolic single revelation comes out of a little noticed piece of research by Margaret Konkol, who discovered that, before selling his manuscripts of draft poems to academic institutions, Graves had carefully erased the annotations and suggestions made by Laura Riding (as she then was) and then rewritten them as his own.