'This is a rich and detailed account of the life and world of Lola Ridge, poet, artist, editor, and activist for the cause of women's rights, workers' rights, racial equality and social reform. Author Svoboda takes the reader on a fascinating journey from Ridge's childhood as a newly arrived Irish immigrant in the grim mining towns of New Zealand to her years as a budding poet and artist in Sydney, Australia, to her migration to America and the cities of San Francisco, Chicago, and New York. At one time considered one of the most popular poets of her day, she later fell out of critical favor due to her realistic and impassioned verse that looked head on at the major social woes of society. Moreover, her work and appearances alongside the likes of Margaret Sanger, Emma Goldman, Will Durant, and other socialists and radicals put her in the line of fire not only of the police and government, but also the literary pundits who criticized her activism as being excessive and melodramatic. This lively portrait gives a veritable who's who of all the key players in the arts, literature, and radical politics of the time, in which Lola Ridge stood front and center. ' (Publication summary)
'How can writers' lives be interesting when they spend all their time writing?
'What did Henry James get up to? Probably not very much. And Rimbaud's life became much more exciting once he gave up writing. And Jane Austen? Lola Ridge, on the other hand, tempts us with a number of puzzles - who was she, what was she really like, is she most significant as a poet or a progressive woman or as a political radical? In terms of a wider picture, Ridge offers entrée to a milieu, the New York avant-garde of the First World War and 1920s. She also offers a poet of uncertain position, slippery in status and contradictory in literary classification; and perhaps she offers a parable of the New Woman and What Happened After; and also a Tale of American Modernism and What Happened After. This combination of stories to be told therefore proposes and promises much. And finally, for New Zealanders, what of Ridge's 23 formative years in New Zealand where she began her writing practice and her publishing career? The problem for a biographer is how to combine these facets so they cohere, rather than finding the puzzles a little obvious, or the world she inhabited already told, or her poetic output a series of glimpses, or her social narrative slightly too idiosyncratic.' (Introduction)
'How can writers' lives be interesting when they spend all their time writing?
'What did Henry James get up to? Probably not very much. And Rimbaud's life became much more exciting once he gave up writing. And Jane Austen? Lola Ridge, on the other hand, tempts us with a number of puzzles - who was she, what was she really like, is she most significant as a poet or a progressive woman or as a political radical? In terms of a wider picture, Ridge offers entrée to a milieu, the New York avant-garde of the First World War and 1920s. She also offers a poet of uncertain position, slippery in status and contradictory in literary classification; and perhaps she offers a parable of the New Woman and What Happened After; and also a Tale of American Modernism and What Happened After. This combination of stories to be told therefore proposes and promises much. And finally, for New Zealanders, what of Ridge's 23 formative years in New Zealand where she began her writing practice and her publishing career? The problem for a biographer is how to combine these facets so they cohere, rather than finding the puzzles a little obvious, or the world she inhabited already told, or her poetic output a series of glimpses, or her social narrative slightly too idiosyncratic.' (Introduction)
