Publisher's Synopsis
The Epilogue essays, published when the literary partnership of Laura Riding and Robert Graves was at its height, illustrate their working relationship and the back-ground to their later very different careers.
Conceived in the mid-1930s by Laura Riding, Epilogue: A Critical Summary was originally to be called The Critical Vulgate, a title suggesting that the thematic concerns of the project would go well beyond the merely literary, attempting to discover, in a secular spirit reminiscent of Voltaire's, the truth regarding all sorts of subjects, from God down. In 1935 'The Idea of God' led off the extraordinary experiment of Epilogue. The effort was to be encyclopaedic, and in this respect the project foreshadows Riding's later life-work, the massive Rational Meaning which she and her husband Schuyler B. Jackson undertook.
The original four volumes, published by Seizin Press (Majorca) and Constable jointly, are now extremely scarce. Quite apart from their considerable intrinsic interest, they offer rich source material for the two authors. Laura (Riding) Jackson never reprinted any of her Epilogue work, while Robert Graves republished some of his, in revised form. This selection alerts general readers to a rigorous, impassioned and remarkably alive creative and critical moment.
