Robert Graves - Muse or victim?

Graves spent a large part of his childhood in north Wales. He returned there, traumatised, after the war, together with his first wife, Nancy Nicholson. In 1930, Graves began a new life at Deia in Mallorca with the American poet, Laura Riding. Years later, Riding accused her celebrated former partner of stealing his idea for a goddess (The White Goddess) from her own work.
Riding was wrong. Miranda Seymour shows how Graves was obsessed with the idea of a cruel and dominant female from childhood. He cast Riding as his goddess and muse, just as, in later years, he would seek out young women and confer the role on them. Did Riding have magical powers? After inheriting her ring by chance, Miranda isn’t sure. But there’s no doubt that Riding had a tremendous influence – for the good - on Graves’s early and finest work. Torment suited him. But what did it do for the young women whose lives he hijacked? What’s the price of being a muse?