SOURCE: Heuving, Jeanne. “A Stranger in the Country of Men.” Women's Review of Books 11, no. 5 (February 1994): 30-31.

In the following review, Heuving offers an overview of Riding's life and work.

In the literary world, Laura Riding is famous for two things: living with Robert Graves and renouncing poetry at the height of her highly respected career. In 1938, Riding, at the age of 37, published her Collected Poems and wrote virtually no more poetry. By the late 1930s, she had authored or coauthored more than thirty books, including poetry, fiction, critical essays and “found” writing. But between that time and her death in 1991, she published only one new book, The Telling. Riding's rejection of poetry was only one of many renunciations—of narrative, of history, of myth, and of most writers and thinkers of her time. Nothing could be spared her quest for a “language open” in which “truth” and...