Robert Graves: The Years with Laura, 1926-1940 is the second installment of Richard Perceval Graves’s three-volume biography of his uncle. Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895-1926 covered the poet’s early years at Charterhouse and Oxford; his experiences at the front in France during World War I, where he was wounded and left for dead; his marriage to the artist and radical feminist Nancy Nicolson; and the publication of his first books of poems.
The new volume begins with Graves’s departure, in January 1926, for Egypt, where he was to take up the post of Professor of English at Cairo University. He left Egypt six months later, describing the university (in a letter to T. S. Eliot) as “a beautifully constructed farce in the best French style and dangerous if taken in the slightest degree seriously.” Along with his wife and children on that Egyptian journey was Laura Gottschalk (later Riding), the young American poet who had come to England to collaborate with Graves on a book about modern poetry. Their famous affair destroyed the Graveses’ marriage, and led to one of the stormiest relationships in modern literary history.
The Years with Laura also charts the publication, in 1929, of Good-bye to All That, the autobiography in which Graves made his bitter adieu to his country. In Majorca, which was to be Graves’s principal home for the rest of his long life, Graves and Riding formed, at first, a productive literary partnership. This attachment soon came to
