Kathryn Hughes, reviewing Terry Eagleton’s book Critical Revolutionaries (21 April), says, “Cambridge, the university with which they were all connected, was not particularly welcoming to female academics”, the “they” being TS Eliot, William Empson, FR Leavis and Raymond Williams.
Prof Hughes might take solace in the fact it was Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity that was the major springboard for the “new criticism” of the next six decades (and beyond), and that Empson got the whole idea from Laura Riding and her book, written with Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, published in 1927.
Recent scholarly work shows that she was the authentic provider of thought in this book, including the close analysis of Shakespeare’s Sonnet 129, which sent Empson off in a scribbling frenzy to write his book based on that analysis. She has never been accorded recognition for this because of the mafia-like conspiracy post-1940 that arose under the auspices of Graves and his public school acolytes. Empson himself refused to recognise her as the foremost author of A Survey of Modernist Poetry because, he said at the time, “I didn’t know who she was”, and left her out of his acknowledgements.
It is also no coincidence that Riding was a member of the renowned “Fugitive” group of poets in America, which included, significantly, John Crowe Ransom, a real critic, before she came to England in 1926 and set the poetry world abuzz. Much of A Survey of Modernist Poetry is taken from her book written at the same time, Contemporaries and Snobs, a work of intellectual rigour which has thus far proven to be beyond the ordinary intelligence of literary criticism. IA Richards and the others? They had nothing to do with it.
Dr Mark Jacobs
Nottingham
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