Laura Riding was born on January 16th, 1901 in New York City. Her parents were Nathaniel and Sarah Reichenthal. Growing up, even though she had Jewish roots, they did not shape who she became.
She attended Cornell University but did not finish and get her degree. In 1920, she got married to Louis Gottschalk and moved to the midwest of the United States with him. The two divorced in 1925 but she still kept her first name even as she published Voltaire: A Bibliographical Fantasy in 1927. Her works were initially recognized by the Fugitives, a group of writers at Vanderbilt so they were the first to publish Riding in the magazine Fugitive.
She moved to England and met Robert Graves and then began to live with him. Riding attempted suicide in 1929 but soon Riding and Graves established the Seizin Press and began to publish. The period where most of her works were produced were during 1926 to 1938, but afterwards, she rejected writing poetry.
At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, Riding and Graves moved to the United States but their relationship ended because she found no pleasure in the control she had over Graves and felt that he depended on her too much. She later married Schuyler Jackson who was a poetry reviewer for Times magazine. Jackson and Riding lived in Florida. Riding died on September 2, 1991 due to heart failure in Florida.
Her works won her the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1973, the National Endowment for the Arts in 1979 and the Bollingen Prize in 1991
(Poetry Foundation, Richrd Graves, Jane Gabin)
Laura Riding & Robert Graves 