Jessie Laidlay Weston

Jessie Laidlay Weston was an English independent scholar, medievalist and folklorist, working mainly on mediaeval Arthurian texts.

Weston was the daughter of William Weston, a tea merchant and member of the Salters' Company, and his second wife, Sarah Burton, and named after his first wife Jessica Laidlay. Sarah, after giving birth to two more daughters died when Jessie was about seven. William remarried Clara King who gave birth to five more children. The elder siblings were born in Surrey, but youngest son Clarence was born in Kent. Jessie, her sister Frances and brother Clarence later moved to Bournemouth, where Jessie began her writing career, remaining there until around 1903. Her home at 65 Lansdowne Road still stands, as of 2010. Jessie studied in Hildesheim then Paris, France under Gaston Paris. She also studied at the Crystal Palace School of Art.

One of her first printed works was a lengthy sentimental verse called The Rose-Tree of Hildesheim. A narrative about "sacrifice and denial", it was modelled on the story of the Thousand-year Rose, which grows on a wall at Hildesheim Cathedral. Published in 1896, it was the title verse in an omnibus of her poems.

Her best-known work is From Ritual to Romance (1920). In it she brought to bear an analysis harking back to James George Frazer on the Grail legend, arguing for origins earlier than the Christian or Celtic sources conventionally discussed at the time. It was cited by T. S. Eliot in his notes to The Waste Land (1922), and mentioned as one of two chief inspirations for the poem along with James Frazer's The Golden Bough. Eliot later claimed, in his lecture The Frontiers of Criticism (1956), that his original intention was merely to add the references he had employed, to counter earlier criticisms of his work as plagiarizing. More extensive notes were requested by the publisher to bulk out the length of the poem in book form, calling them "bogus scholarship".