Finding Lost Voices: If Geography Has to Be Considered, Laura Riding Jackson 1901-1991

A weekly email that brings back the voices of those who have been forgotten or misremembered

Feb 09, 2026

Laura Riding Jackson’s life seems like a distorted legend; a story that reflects back up from the waters, blurred by capillary waves. Her writing, too, isn’t easy. It shimmers beneath the surface like a delicious fish. It seems apt to write about such a poet during the week of Gertrude Stein’s birthday (Feb. 3), as Jackson’s work has often been compared to Stein’s. For example, Nancy Carol Joyner and Allison Hersh observed in the Reference Guide to American Literature, “For Riding, as for Stein, poetic meaning can not only be found in words of the poem; it is also produced in the spaces between words, in the sparks that result from the collision of words and in the static created by the repetition of language.” It’s those sparks from the collisions of words that have long drawn me to her work.

I first discovered Riding’s work in the early 1990s when I was living in New York City, attending graduate school, and looking for female writers who challenged poetic form (like Stein, whose work I’d fallen in love with during my undergraduate years) as I wasn’t being taught many female poets, especially those who disregarded the rules.

So when I went to visit my friend J.J. in Vero Beach, FL, and she told me that Riding’s house was nearby, I couldn’t wait to see it.

Riding’s house, like her writing, is difficult to pin down to an exact geography as it has been relocated twice since her death in 1991. When I visited it in January, the house stood on the Indian River State College Mueller Campus, adjacent to the new library, where it has been renovated and preserved by the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation.

The day we visited, the house was locked, but I could still peer into the wide screened porch and through the kitchen windows. and get a sense of the house and what it must have been like when Riding lived in it. As a poet, I think metaphorically. So the house felt like a vehicle through which I could better understand the tenor, its inhabitant, Riding.

The outside of the pine house was white, trimmed in green, and the inside walls were stained dark brown. Originally, it was located in Wabasso, Florida, on an eleven-acre citrus grove where it was built in 1907, but she and her husband did not move into it and take over managing the citrus grove until 1943. My friend J.J .told me the house is an example of Florida “cracker” architecture, characterized by raised floors, a tin roof, porches, and large windows for cross-ventilation to combat Florida’s oppressive summer heat.

When Riding’s husband, Schuyler Jackson, died in 1968, she lived on in the house alone, without electricity, until her death in 1991. She told her biographer, Elizabeth Friedmann, that she didn’t want electricity because she didn’t want the lines to mar the house’s appearance. Instead, the house was filled with kerosene lamps, and every surface was covered with papers.

Riding was never one to follow the rules set by society, either in her home, her love life, or in her work as a writer, and it’s perhaps because of this that few remember her important work as a poet, writer, and critic. In fact, after she died, many defaced her name. Sir Stephen Spender told the London Standard, “She was a witch!” Jill Neville told Independent Magazine, “I detest this woman.” However, others assumed that her name would be among the most important poets remembered from her era. “When the final verdict on twentieth-century poetry is given, she will have a very high place,” wrote Time magazine at the time of her death.

Sitting in the back garden of her home, watching the afternoon breeze rise up in the palms, I couldn’t help but wonder where the attention to her work had gone and why it had folded outside of what was being read.

More views of Riding's house. From left to right: front view, view inside the screened porch, and the kitchen.

Riding was born in New York City. Her father, Nathaniel Saul Reichenthal, had come to America from Austria-Hungary in 1884 during the second major wave of European emigration. When he arrived in New York, he worked in the sweatshops of the garment district. His first wife died, and soon after, he married Riding’s mother, Sarah “Sadie” Edersheim.

Riding attended Cornell University, where she met historian Louis R. Gottschalk, then a graduate assistant. They married in 1920. She began writing poetry soon after and saw her first poems published in The Fugitive, a literary magazine housed at Vanderbilt University and edited by Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Merrill Moore, Donald Davidson, William Ridley Wills, and Robert Penn Warren. Tate was especially enamored with Riding’s work and encouraged the editorial staff to award her the Nashville Prize in 1924. As her literary success grew, however, her marriage began to unravel, and she divorced in 1925.

At this time, Riding’s poetry was unusual. In 1924, poets like Edna St. Vincent Millay were famous, voices quite different from Riding’s. As the poet, translator, and editor, Sonia Raiziss, reflected, "When The Fugitive (1922–1925) flashed down the new sky of American poetry, it left a brilliant scatter of names: Ransom, Tate, Warren, Riding, Crane.... Among them, the inner circle and those tangent to it as contributors, there was no one quite like Laura Riding."