Robert Graves accused of stealing lover’s work

Robert Graves, one of Britain's foremost First World War poets, has been accused of stealing ideas, literary criticism and poetry from his one-time American mistress Laura Riding Jackson and passing them off as his own. The claim is made by Dr Mark Jacobs, a research fellow at Nottingham Trent University, who corresponded with Jackson for 30 years until her death in 1991.

In one of the letters, Jackson accuses Graves of having "sucked, bled, squeezed, plucked, picked, grabbed, dipped, sliced, carved, lifted the body of my work". As an example, Jacobs, who is writing a book about the couple’s turbulent relationship, cites Graves’s seminal study of poetic inspiration, The White Goddess, published in 1938. Jackson claimed that the idea for the work was lifted directly from an essay she had written in 1930s called The Idea Of God and from her book, The Word Women, which preceded what is considered Graves’s magnum opus.

Jacob says that Jackson had asked Graves to burn the manuscript of The Word Women when they were forced to flee their home in Spain on the outbreak of the civil war in 1936. Jacobs adds: "She left her manuscript in Majorca. She later wrote to him [Graves] and told him to burn the manuscript. We now know that he didn't. It all appeared in dribble form in The White Goddess. He used it for his own ends without mentioning it to her. She only found out in the 1950s [when it was published]."