Product Description

Laura (Riding) Jackson set out to understand "the woman element in human identity". "The Word 'Woman'" belongs in the company of other works of gender study. It collects her most explicit writings on the subject. The title piece, published for the first time, was written in Majorca during 1933-5 when she and Robert Graves were associated in fruitful literary partnership. Left behind when they fled at the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the manuscript was later in the possession of Robert Graves, who used Riding's thought as source material for "The White Goddess". By investigating definitions, historical and literary usages, the words of women about themselves, and the physical body of woman, Laura (Riding) Jackson seeks to understand the word "woman". Motherhood, "man-fever" in women, work satisfaction, sexual equality, and the essential relationship between man and woman are all considered. The book also includes three later essays, two stories, and an unpublished personal commentary on the relationship of her thought on woman to Robert Graves's.

Product Details

• Published on: 1994-03-24
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 180 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Did Robert Graves "steal" the material for The White Goddess from Laura Riding's ( Selected Poems: In Five Sets ) unpublished writings, as Riding claimed? Now that this lost, uncompleted 1930s manuscript has surfaced, readers can judge for themselves. In "The Word Woman " Riding hypothesizes that there are two things man does not know: God and woman. Supporting her theory with quotes from literature and religion, she shows that while man divines God, when it comes to woman he attempts "to identify the different with himself." Having, in the editors' words, "achieved an extraordinary degree of success in a man's world," Riding (1901-1991) hoped to distance herself from autobiographical references, yet unexpected juxtapositions of material make this a very subjective study. Fleshing out this volume are two stories from the 1930s that, after didactic openings, show her ideas in action. As for essays dating from the 1960s and 1970s, her single theme--the place of women in the universe--becomes tiresome by the late 1970s; Riding is best when she tackles contemporary issues head-on, as when she makes a strong case for calling modern feminism "a movement of folly."
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This intense, intriguing work contains prose pieces by the modernist poet (Riding) Jackson (1901-91). Forming most of this volume is the unfinished and previously unpublished work The Word "Woman , " written in the Thirties, in which Jackson developed her understanding of woman's identity, unfolding fascinating revelations from her investigations of langugage and the human understanding of "woman" as found historically in definitions, religion, mythology, and literature. The author made bold, honest, controversial statements about the relations between the sexes and women's self-understanding. This message, among others, is reiterated in her essays as well as in the story "Women as People" (c.1934). An added feature is "Robert Graves's 'The White Goddess' " (1975), in which Jackson takes to task Graves, with whom she had a 13-year association, for appropriating her ideas. This book should be in all gender-studies collections.
- Jeris Cassel, Rutgers Univ. Libs., New Brunswick, N.J.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews
Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-91) is being rediscovered with a vengeance: Within 18 months of her death, her early unpublished poems, her selected poems, a biography, and this collection of prose pieces (most previously unpublished) will have appeared. The central essays here, ``The Word `Woman,' '' takes up over half the volume. Written in Mallorca in the mid-1930's, the manuscript was abandoned there with the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and returned to Jackson only in the 1970's. In the essay, she proposes to ``extricate'' woman from male mythological and historical perceptions of her, to examine the differences between the sexes to explain ``not only woman herself, but man as well,'' and to ``establish, finally, the unity of all being.'' Jackson is an arch dogmatist, proceeding by sweeping knowledge, uncorrupted by the historical realities, and her conclusion (``To be a woman finally is to be truth'') falls a little flat on a late-20th- century ear. But the essay does provide insight into her struggle as a woman writer against the effort of her long-time companion, Robert Graves, to capture her as his ``muse.'' Written decades after their breakup, her 1975 essay on Graves's treatise The White Goddess betrays the persistence of her effort to ``extricate'' her imagination from Graves's equally persistent mythologizing of ``woman.'' Also included here are an affected and unsatisfying short story, ``Woman as People''; a brisk parable, ``Eve's Side of It''; and a forbiddingly abstract 1974 piece entitled ``The Sex Factor in Social Progress.'' Unlike previous reprints of her stories and poetry, this collection exhibits neither the wit nor the genius that Jackson always claimed for herself, and that many others claim for her. For the cognoscenti only. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.