Consisting of essays of the 1960s and 1970s and assembled by Laura Riding Jackson herself this previously unpublished collection is both a substantial addition to the work of her later period after she had renounced poetry and also a spirited contribution to later twentiethcentury debates about language literature and life. There is immense variety and appeal here. Readers will find themselves challenged by the authors combative engagement with her contemporaries and rewarded by the lucid complexity and immediacy of her thinking. Topics include love friendship imagination thinking belief and conviction the importance of knowledge of language the active unselfishness of women the intrinsic reality of mind death good and evil soul and spirit structuralism and theory the novel history myth besides her judgements on writers such as Coleridge and contemporaries such as Stein. As the excitement aroused by theory subsides now may be the time for Laura Riding Jacksons considered judgement of the spiritual function of language and human life to be given the attention it deserves.