Brief Curriculum Vitae

·     My Interest in Laura Riding’s work, and her place in twentieth century literature more generally, began in the 1960s, and then as an undergraduate student of English at York University.

·      I took a PhD on Laura (Riding) Jackson under the guidance of the poet and critic G.S. Fraser at Leicester University, and was awarded a doctorate in 1976, examined by Professor Edwin Morgan. During this period I published a book of my own poetry and founded and edited the poetry magazine, Omens (1970-3).

·      Between 1972 and 1985 I became a close correspondent with Laura (Riding) Jackson; this correspondence is now held in the Nottingham Trent University archive, available at https://www4.ntu.ac.uk/laura_riding/archive/index.html.

·      Leverhulme Fellowship, 1979, awarded to add biographic detail to this book.

·      Special needs teacher 1979-98; part-time English Communications Lecturer, Nottingham Trent University, 1985-9.

·      Appointed Member of the Laura (Riding) Jackson Board of Literary Management from 1997 until it was wound up under the terms of the author’s Will in 2010 and passed to Cornell University.

·      I was chosen by the board to write the introduction to the centennial edition of Laura Riding’s Collected Poems (New York: Persea Books, 2001).

·      Fellow of the English Department at Nottingham Trent University in 2008, where created and still maintain the Laura (Riding) Jackson website, https://www4.ntu.ac.uk/laura_riding/index.html, and founder of the Laura (Riding) Jackson library archive.

·      I was appointed Laura (Riding) Series Editor for Trent Editions, the publishing house for Nottingham Trent University’s English Department; in which role I oversaw the publication of the two volumes of The Person I Am, by Laura (Riding) Jackson, edited by Carroll Ann Friedmann and John Nolan, in 2011; and four new editions, each with a substantial introduction, of the four most important early collections of Laura Riding’s poems. A fifth volume of selected letters has been published by Concur Books (2025).

·    I wrote and edited the introduction to the Trent Edition of her first book, The Close Chaplet (1926) in 2018.

·      Other relevant publications include:

                        ‘The Question of Bias: Some Treatments of Laura (Riding) Jackson’, Mark Jacobs and Alan Clark, Hiroshima Studies in English Language and Literature, Vol 21, Nos 1 and 2, 1971, 1-29, since republished recently;

                  ‘Rewriting History, Literally: Laura Riding’s The Close Chaplet’, Gravesiana, Vol 3, No 3, Summer 2012;

‘Contemporary Misogyny: Laura Riding, William Empson and the Critics—A Survey of Mis-History’, English, Oxford University Press, 2015, Vol 64, No 246, pp. 222-240

                  ‘A Journey to Wabasso’, memoir of my visit to Laura (Riding) Jackson at her Florida home in 1978; in Jack Blackmore’s The Unthronged Oracle (Cirencester: Mereo Books, 2016).

‘September Surprise’ TES, 11 January 2002, on OfSted https://www.tes.com/news/september-surprise