She was born in New York City to Nathaniel Reichenthal, a Jewish immigrant from Galicia, and Sadie (née Edersheim), and educated at Cornell University.

Phibbs agreed, but after a few months changed his mind and returned to his wife, referring to Riding as "a virago" in a letter to his friend Thomas MacGreevy.

[6] Following the break-up with Nancy, until the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, Riding and Graves lived in Deià, Majorca, where they were visited by writers and artists including James Reeves, Norman Cameron, John Aldridge, Len Lye, Jacob Bronowski and Honor Wyatt.

While still in London they had set up (1927) the Seizin Press, collaborated on A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) (which inspired William Empson to write Seven Types of Ambiguity and was in some respects the seed of the New Criticism), A Pamphlet Against Anthologies (1928) and other works.

[8] In Majorca, the Seizin Press was enlarged to become a publishing imprint, producing inter alia the substantial hardbound critical magazine Epilogue (1935–1938), edited by Riding with Graves as associate editor.

The vernacular cracker house in which they lived[9] has been renovated and preserved by the Laura Riding Jackson Foundation at the Vero Beach campus of Indian River State College.

"[12] She had already written to the Editor of the Minnesota Review, in 1967, about how Graves had used her as a source: "In my thinking, the categorically separated functions termed intellectual, moral, spiritual, emotional, were brought into union, into joint immediacy; other conceptions put the sun and moon in their right rational places as emblems of poetic emotionalism, and lengthened the perspective of Origin back from the skimpy historical heavens of masculine divinity through a spacious dominion of religious symbolism, pre-sided over, for the sake of poetic justice, by a thing I called mother-god.

[14] She withdrew from public literary life, working with Schuyler Jackson on a dictionary (published posthumously in 1997) that would lead them into an exploration of the foundations of meaning and language.

In April 1962, she read "Introduction for a Broadcast" for the BBC Third Programme, her first formal statement of her reasons for renouncing poetry (there had been a brief reference book entry in 1955).

[15] Writings and publications continued to flow throughout the sixties, seventies and eighties, as Laura (Riding) Jackson (her authorial name from 1963 onwards) explored what she regarded as the truth-potential of language, free from the artificial restrictions of poetic art.