Lives of Wives, first published in 1939, was written shortly after the preparation of Laura Riding's Collected Poems. In her new afterword, Laura (Riding) Jackson writes: 'I recall that I wrote in a copy of the book that I gave to a friend many years ago that it was "something written of the past to make the present, our present, something more than that".' She added, 'These are suppositious histories, but the foundations are factual. Fancy, in them, imitates knowledge, and delineation, truth - with some lucky strikes'.