Synthesis 12 (2019) 21 “The ever-dissolving image of deceptively tranquil antiquity”: Classical Myth and Literature in the Prose and Poetry of Laura Riding Elena Theodorakopoulos Abstract This essay discusses the poet, critic and novelist Laura (Riding) Jackson (1901-1991), and her engagement with classical myth and literature. The focus is on her poetry and on the novel A Trojan Ending. The aim of the essay is to establish Riding as a significant voice in the reception and interpretation of classical myth and literature during the 1920s and 30s. This essay considers the poet, critic, and novelist Laura Riding, known later as Laura (Riding) Jackson, and her engagement with classical literature and culture. 1 It should be seen within the context of recent scholarship re-establishing the role of women writers within classical reception studies, spear-headed most notably by Fiona Cox in two monographs on contemporary women writers (2011 and 2018) and by Isobel Hurst in her book on Victorian women writers and the classics (2006). 2 In Riding’s case, the engagement with classical myth and literature is, as I will show, closely linked to her thinking and writing about women, and about what it means to be a woman; the two subjects, women and classical myth, are linked in her first collection, The Close Chaplet (1926), in Collected Poems (1938), and in her novel A Trojan Ending (1937), as well as her long essay The Word ‘Woman,’ drafted around 1934 and published posthumously in 1993. Reading her work in the context of ‘women’s writing’ is complicated by the ambivalence, often hostility, (Riding) Jackson displays towards other women writers, and her dislike of the category ‘woman writer’ (for example 2011: 53-55). 3 Reading Riding’s work in the context of classical reception is complicated by the ambivalence, often contempt, she brings to bear on the display of classical learning in other poets’ work, and by the oblique and refracted manner in which she herself approaches classical material. In the Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the US, Jo-Ann Wallace asserts that “Given the quality of Riding’s poetry…her relative critical neglect can be explained only by her refusal to cede interpretive authority over her life and works” (Davidson and Wagner-Martin 1995: 726). While I believe that Wallace is substantially correct, and the later writings of (Riding) Jackson provide ample