An American
poet (1901-1991), known for her association with
Robert Graves.
Her first published poem was in the magazine The Fugitive in 1923; her first volume was The Close Chaplet (Hogarth Press, 1926).
She was born Laura Reichenthal in New York. She married Louis Gottschalk in 1920 and in 1923 adopted the style Laura Riding Gottschalk. They divorced in 1925; in 1927 she changed her name by deed poll to Laura Riding. She married Schuyler Jackson in 1941 and adopted the style Laura (Riding) Jackson in 1955, when she renounced the writing of poetry. She died on 2 September 1991.
She also wrote criticism and theory: with Graves she wrote A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928); and with Jackson Rational Meaning, "a new foundation of the definition of words".
Riding lived in England 1925-1929 and 1936-1939, and with Robert Graves in Deyá on Majorca between 1929 and 1936: they fled when the Spanish Civil War overtook them. Jacob Bronowski stayed with them for some time, and they all worked on A Dictionary of Related Meanings.