A mannered grace

"Laura (Riding) Jackson, poet and thinker, is one of the most important figures in twentieth-century American and British literature. She is also one of the most perplexing. With the publication of this long-awaited, authorized biography written by the woman she took into her confidence, Laura (Riding) Jackson can be seen for the first time in a clarifying light." "Thought of primarily as a brilliant poet, (Riding) Jackson was awarded the prestigious Bollingen Prize in 1991, yet, paradoxically, she had renounced the writing of poetry more than forty years earlier. Literary figures such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Ted Hughes, Robert Graves, and W.H. Auden praised her work and acknowledged her influence. Yet popularly she is known as Robert Graves's collaborator and muse, perhaps even the "White Goddess" of his well-known book of the same name, and as the woman who leapt from a high window out of love or jealousy. This and other episodes of her personal life have been exaggerated, misunderstood, and sensationalized in biographies, memoirs, a novel, and in the public consciousness. Yet she devoted most of her life to Schuyler Jackson, the man she married - once Time magazine's p