Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Germaine Greer
Standard Name: Greer, Germaine
Birth Name: Germaine Greer
Pseudonym: Germaine
Pseudonym: Dr G.
Pseudonym: Earth Rose
Pseudonym: Rose Blight
GG
, scholar and media person, was one of the early and most important voices in the explosion of feminist theory and action in the 1970s. She also worked in journalism and published a satirical gardening column. She has written academic literary history, and monographs of social analysis on a number of burning topics: population control, the status of women, international relations between rich and poor countries, and environmental damage and conservation. GG
has founded and run a journal devoted to the study of women's writing. Her editorial production includes a ground-breaking anthology of seventeenth-century women's poetry, as well as collected works by individual early female poets, and broader poetry selections. Her book about discovering her father's mysterious past combines biography with autobiography.
Nearly twenty years later Sylvia Pankhurst
accused this book of sensationalism and of preaching the sex war deprecated and denied by the older Suffragists.
Purvis, June, and Maureen Wright. “Writing Suffragette History: the contending autobiographical narratives of the Pankhursts”. Women’s History Review, Vol.
14
, No. 3/4, pp. 405-33.
419
In the later twentieth century it was dismissed by a...
Literary responses
Anne Stevenson
Germaine Greer
praises her in Slip-Shod Sibyls for expressing consciousness of herself as a woman poet rather than the woman poet, for looking forward to the forging of a new language in which women would...
Literary responses
Emmeline Pankhurst
Germaine Greer
has observed that the fact of Emily Davison
's death after running in front of the king's horse in the Derbyremains unspoken in Pankhurst's speech, which hardly makes sense without it.
Greer, Germaine, and Emmeline Pankhurst. “Foreword”. Freedom or death, Guardian News and Media.
6
Literary responses
Lucy Hutchinson
Since her tally of works in print began to climb steeply in the 1990s, anthologists Jane Stevenson
and Peter Davidson
have called LHone of the most important poets, man or woman, of the mid-century...
Literary responses
Elizabeth Jennings
She held bursaries or grants from the Arts Council
(after the initial one for her first book) in 1965, 1968, and 1972.
“Lauinger Library: Special Collections Division”. Georgetown University Library.
Some critics disparage EJ
's work along lines effectively summarized by Robert Crawford
Literary responses
Anna Wickham
AW
has had a recent detractor in Germaine Greer
, who claims that the perceived political importance of what she was doing greatly distorted contemporary assessment of her achievement.
Greer, Germaine. Slip-Shod Sibyls. Penguin.
415
Greer disparages her poetry as...
Literary responses
Ruth Pitter
Germaine Greer
, anthologizing this poem, notes that it would be merely conventional, just the usual moralisation of the gardening process, but for the specificity which makes it read like instructions to students of horticulture.
Greer, Germaine, editor. Poems for Gardeners. Virago.
230
Literary responses
Sappho
Margaret Reynolds
in The Sappho Companion, 2001, sweeps with a broad net translations, portraits, ballets, operas, poems, plays, novels, songs and treatises.
Gubar, Susan. “Multiple personality”. Women’s Review of Books, Vol.
xviii
, No. 12, pp. 13-14.
13
She too ends on the potential of Sappho as lesbian foremother...
Literary responses
Carol Ann Duffy
Germaine Greer
called I Wouldn't Thank You for a Valentinebreezy and populist.
Greer, Germaine. “A biodegradable art. Changing fashions in anthologies of women’s poetry”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 4813, pp. 7-8.
8
Literary responses
Jan Morris
Germaine Greer
wrote a review for the Evening Standard which opens politely: You cannot help liking Jan Morris and she poses her Conundrum in great style. Greer uses the feminine pronoun but asserts that Morris...
Intertextuality and Influence
Monica Furlong
She begins arrestingly: We live in a period in which it is not possible to talk meaningfully about God.
Furlong, Monica. The End of Our Exploring. Hodder and Stoughton.
13
She then posits an absolute human need for meaning and for myth (the core...
Family and Intimate relationships
Maya Angelou
MA
made her second marriage, to Australian journalist and house-builder Paul du Feu
, in the same year in which he was divorced from Germaine Greer
and published a memoir entitled Let's Hear It for...
Family and Intimate relationships
William Shakespeare
Her name was given wrongly in the licence, which has given rise to various lines of speculation; however, there seems no good reason to doubt that Shakespeare intended from this date to marry the woman...
Cultural formation
William Shakespeare
Scholarly debate continues to rage on the question of whether WS
subscribed to the Church of England
or whether he adhered to the minority and persecuted Old Religion of Catholicism
. Supporters of the Catholic...
Anthologization
Alice Sutcliffe
Only a handful of copies of this survive (four were known in 1996).
