Germaine Greer: Untamed Shrew
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- €2.99
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- €2.99
Publisher Description
The story of one of the most intriguing people in a generation.
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.
Over 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. Child of the beat generation, leader (and victim) of the 60s sexual revolution, she continues to assail our complacency.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this unauthorized biography, Australian journalist Wallace relentlessly stalks Germaine Greer, ultimately finding few redeeming intellectual, creative or social attributes in her subject. Wallace starts out with an apparently even-tempered investigation of Greer's upbringing in 1950s Australia, her early career as actress-cum-journalist and her completion of a doctorate in English literature at Cambridge, leading to Greer's explosion into celebrity in 1970 with The Female Eunuch, a book Wallace calls a testament to "hegemonic heterosexuality." Although the bestseller made Greer synonymous with women's liberation, Wallace argues that Greer was an opportunist who took advantage of a historical moment to feather her own nest. She quotes scholars and participants in the feminist movement who saw Greer as a quisling to both the women's movement and the sexual revolution. Wallace often gets in a quick left-right, as when she concludes that Greer derived her premise for The Female Eunuch from Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver's "Allegory of the Black Eunuch," in Soul on Ice, and then charges that Greer's book was "politically naive." She also contends that Greer capitulated to men by blaming women for the male violence inflicted on them in language that "relied on traditional rhetorical ploys," such as Greer's Marxist allusion to women as "sexual proletariats." Greer's disenchantment with Catholicism, her problematic relationship with her parents and husband (a man whom Wallace casts as the "culmination of her heterosexual rough trade fantasy") and her role as a bomb thrower against the women's movement are all covered. But all these issues are raised as part of a one-sided treatment of Greer and her writings. Photos not seen by PW.
