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.
Germaine Greer
perceives in The Diehards an allusion to the period when these poems were composed and published, when parks and lawns were dug up for food and 1,400,000 Britons were digging for victory.
Greer, Germaine, editor. Poems for Gardeners. Virago.
211
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
Reception
Ruth Pitter
During her lifetime RP
was deeply appreciated by some readers. C. S. Lewis
scatters through his letters such remarks as Whenever I re-read your poems, I blame myself for not re-reading them oftener.
King, Don W. “The Anatomy of a Friendship: the correspondence of Ruth Pitter and C. S. Lewis, 1946-1962: Mythlore, Summer 2003”. Findarticles.
This volume brings together pieces from various occasions and venues. In them MR
discusses many of her favourite topics—the food, sex and god named in her title, the second and third often involving the relation...
Textual Features
Carol Rumens
The new work in CR
's Selected Poems is full of surprises. Plangent love poems, end-of-love poems, poems about the heartbreaking vulnerability and risk-running of teenage girls, lie side by side with wryly satirical renderings...
Textual Features
Carol Rumens
In her introduction CR
calls for quality and professionalism. Those women writers, she says, who have been concerned with the stern art of poetry as an end in itself have tended to be swamped by...
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...
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...
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...
Anthologization
Jo Shapcott
Germaine Greer
's Poems for Gardeners, 2003, includes several of the sensuous little 2-stanza poems that are Shapcott's version of Rainer Maria Rilke
's Les Roses, and printed in her Tender Taxes...
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...
Anthologization
Alice Sutcliffe
Only a handful of copies of this survive (four were known in 1996).
Cullen, Patrick, and Alice Sutcliffe. “Introductory Note”. Alice Sutcliffe, Scolar Press, p. ix - xiii.
xii
It was included by Germaine Greer
, Jeslyn Medoff
, and others in Kissing the Rod, 1988, and selected by...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Rose Tremain
This book opens by looking back just over a century, when John Stuart Mill
presented petitions to parliament on behalf of women's suffrage in 1866 and 1867. It relates the story of the suffragist movement...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Marina Warner
In Our Lady of the CountercultureMW
writes of her own early search for heroinism from heroines like Eleanor of Aquitaine
or Florence Nightingale
(featured in the young people's comic Girl) through scandalous women...
Textual Production
Anne Wharton
Besides the anthologies mentioned by her editors Greer
and Hastings
, there were at least fourteen reprints during the first half of the eighteenth century of AW
's song beginning How hardly I conceal'd my tears.
Londry, Michael. “On the Use of First-Line Indices for Researching English Poetry of the Long Eighteenth Century, c. 1660-1830, with Special Reference to Women Poets”. The Library, Vol.
