Jessie Laidlay Weston (28 December 1850 – 29 September 1928) was an English independent scholar, medievalist and folklorist, working mainly on mediaeval Arthurian texts.
In it she brought to bear an analysis harking back to James George Frazer on the Grail legend, arguing for origins earlier than the Christian or Celtic sources conventionally discussed at the time.
It was cited by T. S. Eliot in his notes to The Waste Land (1922), and mentioned as one of two chief inspirations for the poem along with James Frazer's The Golden Bough.
More extensive notes were requested by the publisher to bulk out the length of the poem in book form, and Eliot called them "bogus scholarship".
The interpretation of the Grail quest as mystical and connected to self-realisation, which she added to the anthropological layer of reading, was to become increasingly popular during the 1920s.