Germaine Greer - Hardcover

Wallace, Christine

3.27

81 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1860661203 ISBN 13: 9781860661204

Publisher: Metro Books, 1999

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Germaine Greer is one of the opinion-formers of our age, her challenging views constantly provoking us in print and on the small screen. "The Female Eunuch", her first book published in 1970, was hailed by the women's liberation movement and influenced an entire generation. Yet two years earlier Greer had argued that "there is hardly a woman alive who is not deeply attracted to the notion of a husband of the kind extolled by Kate", the rebellious wife subdued in "The Taming of the Shrew". Nearly 30 years later, as Germaine Greer revises what one reviewer called "one of the most eloquent pieces of anarchist propaganda that have appeared in this century", it is fitting to assess the life and work of this complex, compelling intellect. Christine Wallace, an Australian academic familiar with the background in which Germaine Greer grew up, has drawn extensively from candid interviews with Greer's family, friends and former colleagues as well as from her many autobiographical writings. She reveals a courageous, contradictory, often tormented woman, variously (and often simultaneously) scholar, rock stars' groupie, bohemian, lover of cats and gardening, and a feminist who spurned and then yearned for motherhood. An icon of women's liberation yet fiercely competitive and scathing of other women; a swashbuckling adventuress yet often vulnerable and surprisingly passive in her dealings with men; an inveterate self-dramatist yet incorrigibly honest, Greer has always lived by extremes - and the risks she took have allowed shoals of moderate feminists to swim in her wake. Many followers have been rebuffed by her reckless inconsistency - a quality she shares with Byron, her first literary love, stemming from a rare determination to be true to the moment. This biography puts into context the unhappy childhood, the convent schooling and promiscuous but rigorous university years that shaped Greer's powerful personality and restless intelligence

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Review:

Germaine Greer didn't want this book to be written. Indeed, she described its author, an Australian journalist with a background in parliamentary reporting, as an "amoeba," a "dung-beetle," and a "brain-dead hack." Greer's loss, however, is a reader's gain. This profile of the nonfeminist's feminist is an admirable attempt to analyze Greer's celebrity, and the sales of The Female Eunuch, as a paradigm of postwar media success: "Take a great title, arresting cover artwork, a promotable, quotable author, add sex...." Greer's life makes a compelling story because, like so many professional polemicists, she has never been inhibited by fact, logic, or consistency. Christine Wallace's efforts to unearth the successive layers of Greer's myth reveal her as a young nonfeminist who initially dismissed her agent's suggestion for a book on the status of women; a sexual libertarian who attacked her Cambridge women's college for hiring a transsexual; and a trained scholar who subsequently declared all women academics hopelessly neurotic--only to return to the ivory tower at financially expedient intervals.

Yet in one respect Greer has remained constant: as this biography demonstrates, the media's favorite feminist has been a lifelong misogynist, singling out women (painters, poets, other feminists, her mother, the female eunuch) for opprobrium. Wallace's analysis of this extraordinary career is careful, well-informed (particularly on the Australian intellectual traditions that contributed to Greer's bizarre combination of moral certainty, libertarianism, and political pessimism), and--given her subject's threats and libels--surprisingly fair. As she stresses, The Female Eunuch may have made little impact on organized feminism, but its "vision of assertive women in hot pursuit of pleasure, independence, and spontaneity" empowered the women who read it far beyond the realms of activism. Whether Greer's subsequent writings ever contributed to anything other than her bank account is a different question. In a final irony, the biography she didn't want was published in Britain to coincide with a new book of her own. --Mandy Merck, Amazon.co.uk

From Kirkus Reviews:

An unauthorized and exhaustive biography of the author still best known for her 1971 feminist polemic The Female Eunuch. Wallace is a journalist and writer based in Australia, where Greer was born and educated by Roman Catholic nuns. Although Greer apparently objected strenuously to this biography and offered no cooperation, Wallace was able to tap sources worldwide, including those in Australia who knew the controversial author as either a well-behaved schoolgirl, a budding actress, or a flamboyant graduate student, challenging sexual and social mores. Her anti-authoritarian social philosophy was formed on the fringes of Australian academe, while she wrote a master's thesis on Lord Byron that ignored his misogyny. Later, at England's Cambridge University, her Ph.D. thesis included an analysis of The Taming of the Shrew. One of her conclusions: ``There is hardly a woman alive who is not deeply attracted to . . . a man capable of . . . exercising [Petruchio's] kind of sexual and domestic dominion.'' Greer went on to become a 1960s groupie, teaching college courses during the day, bedding down with rock stars at night, and writing about it for magazines like Suck. Within a few years, The Female Eunuch had made her an international evangelist for a brand of countercultural feminism that eschewed sisterhood in favor of sex, but also examined the dynamics of marriage and women's low self-esteem. Greer wrote other books, including a moving memoir about her emotionally absent father, yet none created the stir of her first. Now settled on a farm in England, she remains a favorite talk-show guest because of her sharp wit and still contentious opinions, and is said to have a new book in the works to be published this year. Ambivalent to women, wavering in her commitment to truth in Wallace's portrait, Greer remains a flawed but fascinating subject. (16 b&w photos, not seen) -- Copyright �1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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