A rarely acknowledged leading light of literary criticism | Letter

Cambridge University may not have always welcomed female academics, but Laura Riding’s work inspired an era of new criticism, writes Dr Mark Jacobs

Kathryn Hughes, reviewing Terry Eagleton’s book Critical Revolutionaries (21 April), says, “Cambridge, the university with which they were all connected, was not particularly welcoming to female academics”, the “they” being TS Eliot, William Empson, FR Leavis and Raymond Williams.

Prof Hughes might take solace in the fact it was Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity that was the major springboard for the “new criticism” of the next six decades (and beyond), and that Empson got the whole idea from Laura Riding and her book, written with Robert Graves, A Survey of Modernist Poetry, published in 1927.