Germaine: The Life of Germaine Greer

by Elizabeth Kleinhenz

Intellectual. Feminist. Polemicist. Provocateur.This riveting biography of Germaine Greer traces the personal and political history of one of the most important, radical, and controversial women of twentieth and twenty-first century feminism. It reveals how her public persona has shifted with time from sixties trailblazer to present-day rabble-rouser, and why she endures as a subject of fascination.This is the first biography of Greer for two decades, drawing on unprecedented access to her extensive personal archive, opened at Melbourne University in 2016. Kleinhenz has interrogated Greer's personal and professional files, spoken to people who have known her from her school days onwards, and read every word written by and about her. Beginning with Greer’s troubled early life in 1940s Melbourne, it traces her career, relationships with men and women, her travels, and her home life, and examines Greer’s work and ideas from The Female Eunuch to the #MeToo movement. The result is a rich, detailed portrait of a woman rightly both legendary and notorious — revealed here in all her glories, weaknesses, and contradictions.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction, Feminism

480 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2018

Reviews

[Paul Bryant]

For my entire life Germaine Greer has been lurking around and popping up in all kinds of places – could be a comedy show like Would I Lie to You?, could be a political discussion like Question Time, or an article in the Guardian, or a proper grownup academic symposium – and she’ll choose her moment and lob a verbal hand grenade into the proceedings that causes the roof to fall in and whips the audience into the kind of madness that makes dogs spin round trying to bite their own hind legs. The last time this happened was on 21 January this very year when she was given an award (UK Australian of the Year!) and was asked for her position on the MeToo movement, and she said

if you spread your legs because he said ‘be nice to me and I’ll give you a job in a movie’ then I’m afraid that’s tantamount to consent

– so that went over like a lead balloon – and in a 2015 tv discussion she encapsulated her views on males transitioning to females by saying


Just because you lop off your dick and then wear a dress doesn’t make you a fucking woman.

Two years after that she denied saying any such thing when she was on yet another tv debate (Genderquake) , & so the producers provided proof, so she modified her views on the spot

chopping off your cock doesn’t make you a fucking woman, it makes you a man without a cock!

So this went down like another lead balloon. It turns out that when you invite the world’s most famous feminist on your show you will probably not get what you thought you were going to get.

It should go without saying that if you’re sensitive to the F word you have no business reading a biography of Germaine Greer, or indeed, no business with GG at all! She does not hold back and never has, and also remember the bon mot about consistency being the bugbear of little minds? That’s her too, her opinions zigzag around like a housefly on LSD and reading this book is like having your brain dragged through a hedge backwards.

It’s great to have the whole story between two covers, and it is wholly fascinating, & I could not stop reading it for two days, but that does not make this book a great or even a very good biography. It needed to be at least 100 pages longer to give the author enough space to give a reasonable account of GG’s major works & put them in the context of other feminist thinking etc etc. But Elizabeth Kleinhenz glides too quickly over the serious stuff and spends an understandable time giving us semi-hilarious anecdotes about GG’s one night stand with Fellini and how she didn’t shag Norman Mailer but would have & how Princess Margaret brushed her hair & how her cats all died.

One annoying consequence of the crabs was that she felt she could not carry out her plan of contacting her occasional lover Warren Beatty. She feared that he might not appreciate her, in her infested state. P232

Well, quite!

It would be hard for any biographer to resist all this gossipy stuff. Jeez, GG exploded like a supernova in 1970 on the publication of The Female Eunuch and it seems everyone who was anyone wanted to meet the beautiful 6 foot tall revolutionary libertarian and so this kind of thing happened a lot



You can hear Betty Friedan and Susan Brownmiller’s teeth grinding in the distance, can’t you. But Germaine lapped it up. She went from new kid on the block to icon in about 15 minutes flat.

The picture we get here of GG’s life is convincing. She never had a partner for longer than a year or two. She never lived with anyone, in any kind of sense. Instead she would buy a large old property and fill it with “non-paying guests” -friends, students, waifs and strays – who would work on the house & garden & till the marrows in return for food & lodging. And GG would be the grand Lady Bountiful.

My ambition is to run a secular monastery of refined pleasures.

Elizabeth Kleinhenz does not turn any striking phrases but the story she tells is so hectic and interesting that it doesn’t matter, except for the deadly dull stuff about Germaine’s gardens and Germaine’s rainforest. In this book you go from tedious stuff about how she didn’t marry some guy in Italy to finding out that GG believed that clitoridectomy was not something Westerners should be opposing and

The concept of untrammeled recreational sex divorced from notions of child-bearing and rearing was selfishly narcissistic, ultimately boring, dangerous for women and destructive of the best conceptions of family life p252

(These views were in her major book Sex and Destiny - yes, it's the world's most famous feminist speaking, not the Pope.)

I marked so many boggling things she did or said as I read this book, too many to mention, a shame because they’re all funny or amazing. So I will conclude with Salman Rushdie’s considered opinion of GG. (He had gone off GG in a big way after she more or less said that he brought the fatwa on himself and he was “a megalomaniac”.)

What people don’t often say about Germaine Greer is that she is barking mad.


Yeah, but what a bark.

5 stars for the life, 3 stars for the biography itself, so 4 stars.

[Louise]

I’ve been reading about the dark side of the 60’s (JFK assassination and the Manson murders) and saw this book at the library. I never read the Female Eunuch, but it has been so highly discussed, I feel like I have. Greer’s image for me was of media savvy gadfly who wrote a sensational book. Turns out, Greer’s life does not make the fun light read I thought it would be.

Elizabeth Kleinhenz has a page turning start. You get grounded in Greer’s childhood, her teen and college years and academic achievements. I couldn’t tell if the weak middle part was the fault of the text or just the messiness of Greer’s life. The end is mixed. It ties up some of the mystery of her father and gives a summation of Greer’s impact.

Greer’s large life, prolific writing and problematic personality make her a difficult subject. Her story is presented in what seems to be a series of incidents. You do not get a sense who she really is; perhaps it is not knowable. For instance:

- not two years after her PhD thesis where she defends Shakespeare’s Petruchio taming his “shrew”/wife and its wonderful result, she wrote the Female Eunuch which describes how males use power and how women need to take control. Her life to this point (about age 30) does not suggest she has thought about the issues she raises in her book.

- Throughout her life she exposed friends in public … writing sad, embarrassing or intimate things about them and is surprised at their reactions.

- In her 70’s she spoke of her mother’s physical abuse of her father, something, despite her prolific and public life had never come up before.

- She has defended clitorectomies and aborigines beating their wives on cultural grounds. These are hardly feminist positions.

She is a sad figure. Fame has brought her grief. Her husband of a few weeks (or was it days) wrote a bitter book. Abortions (how many?) have left her unable to have children which she has tried to have with various partners and procedures. The hate mail she receives is particularly poisonous. Many would be friends have shown that they merely want to be around this famous person.

Such a life may be all too much for one book or maybe Greer’s story is one that just can’t be told.

[Kate]

I wanted to be reminded of Greer and what all the fuss was about. In that limited sense reading this answered the need while not taking me any nearer to what makes Greer tick.

I found this book utterly unsatisfying in several other ways. It was unauthorised (of course Greer would hate to be pinned down within the covers of a single tome) and the information in it compiled largely from the recently-donated Greer archive at Melbourne University. To me not wanting to tightly control and constrain her narrative seems to be a characteristic of Greer herself. So perhaps by analogy an insight is offered to the elusiveness of Germaine Greer, for it seems to be her special success to remain as elusive as ever.

Why can't Kleinhenz conclude that Greer is indeed a genius without muddying and diluting her thesis with unnecessary ad hominem attacks on Greer's sufficiency as a human? This is after again and again showing that Greer is all human; a feeling, compassionate but complicated person whose energy and drive to explain women's situation and their dilemma elevates her above the fray.

There is much of that. Always iconoclastic Greer speaks truths many women hate. That women police other women is not new but more easily understood with the spreading awareness of unconscious bias.

I am more than ever convinced that Greer broke through with "The Female Eunuch" in a way that other post-war feminists did not because her understanding sensed the harm that patriarchal capitalism had done to the other half of the human race. She wanted women to change in ways that freed them from complicity in patriarchy without throwing the baby out with the bath water.

Not yet accomplished, as an aim it is probably less than we could want. Patriarchy and capitalism are sadly largely unassailable in 2019.
.

[Tyler Upchurch]

I found the Greer of this biography a fascinating figure of our times. As a classic Christian believer, my admiration is tempered with disgust and sorrow over her participation in the sexual revolution and wholesale abandonment of her childhood Catholicism. But her path and decisions along the way make her what she was and is, which has imparted insight to me.

The standout takeaways for me were, first, her admiration for Shakespeare's "The Taming of the Shrew", with her calling Kate's speech near the end the "greatest defense of Christian monogamy ever written", without a single word of critique from her, a doyen of intellectual second wave feminism, and, second, the progression of her thought and attitude toward permissive sexuality, the practical and relational downsides to which she seems to have seen and described fairly clearly in hindsight, which I take as a sign of continued intellectual growth and commendable transparency.

Something which I have not seen taken seriously is the possibility that Greer may be on the autism spectrum. As an autistic person myself who has read extensively about highly gifted autistic people, I see the signs in her, though they aren't what most people understand as such. Female autism is rarely recognized for what it is, but tends to leave an unsettling impression of difference and eccentricity. Her essential "aloneness", rightly seen as contributing to her genius, is also the core definition of autism (Greek autos, meaning self). More could be said on this, but I will leave off.

Of her works, I have only read "The Female Eunuch", but now I wish to keep reading this challenger of the status quo (and its challengers).

The biography itself is quietly excellent and doesn't ever seem disrespectful or ill-considered. Others that know more of literary style or about Greer may have more to say. I conclude that I am glad to have found this book and I recommend it to anyone who wishes to know the woman Germaine Greer.

[Lyndsey Jenkins]

This is a poor biography - confusingly written and gossipy with little attention to her actual ideas or impact. I was disappointed.
There are quotes by very impressive people on the back such as Lisa Jardine which made me think I was getting something really good. Unfortunately I see now that those quotes are about Greer herself, not the book. I don’t think this is a helpful practice.

[Robert]

What should have been an account of a major life is riddled with factual errors, an over-reliance on secondary sources and - one of the hazards of writing a book about a living person - a slight sense that the author resents her subject for not taking part in the biography.

[Domhnall]

Germaine Greer was born in Melbourne in 1939 and this biography takes her life up to 2017, when she is settled back in Australia, working on the restoration of a section of tropical forest. The writer benefited from access to a vast archive of Greer’s personal papers held in Melbourne University. While these naturally shed much light on Greer’s life story, the reality is that Greer has never been reticent in talking publicly about any aspect of her life. “I have arrived at the conclusion that the public Germaine Greer is also, pretty much, herself. There is no mask. What you see is what you get.” [p376]

Greer was enraged by the limitations of her very conventional, suburban family life and, from the start of her further education in Melbourne and then Sydney, she adopted a riotous and bohemian lifestyle. Her height and attractive appearance ensured that she was confident and popular, but it was her intelligence and wit that secured her high social status from the outset. A brilliant student, she won a competitive scholarship to study at Cambridge University in England, where she combined a PhD on Shakespeare with activities including acting with the famous Cambridge Footlights and involvement with the publications Oz and a pornographic magazine called Sucks. Her bohemian lifestyle brought her into a social network that included many famous names in music and entertainment.

She was working as an academic at Warwick University when the publication of The Female Eunuch and her public engagements while promoting this brought international fame as well as considerable wealth.

“In The Female Eunuch, Greer targeted the shortcomings of the first wave of feminism, chief of which was women’s failure to recognise that external factors alone were not responsible for their plight, for they themselves had been conditioned (‘castrated’) into subservience. … women should seek the causes of oppression within themselves and should reassess their own feelings, attitudes and beliefs before they tried to change the world.’” [p363, 364]

“And so the book proceeds towards its blockbuster conclusion: ‘Women have very little idea of how much men hater them’ is a horrific wake-up call. Surely, one thinks, it cannot be true, but she marshals the evidence …. With her usual academic thoroughness…” [p150]

The book had a huge appeal to ordinary women in ways that did not always earn the approval of established feminist academics and writers, some of whom made public statements to distance themselves from her. Yet her research was exceptionally thorough when needed– to an extent that was often tedious – and she found imaginative ways to deploy her erudition. Kleinhenz writes: “She is a performer, a superb communicator, and highly skilled in promoting herself and her ideas. As a writer, she is raunchy, engaging and amusing. Almost alone among feminist writers, she has the capacity to illuminate her books with the products of her scholarship that include individual, often fascinating stories about women’s struggles, disasters and achievement over hundreds of years.” [p376]

It was pretty normal for Greer to be out of step with prevailing feminist wisdom and Kleinhenz offers a theory to account for this: “She was seven years older than the first baby boomers: much of her influence and marketability lay in her capacity to catch the wave of change in the seconds before it broke, to seize upon her own experiences at critical life stages and generalise from them just as the millions of women lining up behind her were about to seek answers to their own dilemmas.” [305]

This was certainly true in the case of Sex and Destiny, published in 1984: when “… newspaper editors were inundated with letters from people who accused Greer of turning her back on the feminist credo through which she made her mark with the Female Eunuch… Galling though she may have found her supposed place among the bigots and body hater, there could be no resiling from her new position (remarkably similar to that of the Catholic Church) that the concept of untrammelled recreational sex divorced from notions of child-bearing and rearing was selfishly narcissistic, ultimately boring, dangerous for women and destructive of the best conceptions of family life. [252]… Greer had come to realize … men can and do manipulate the notion of sexual freedom to suit themselves and the consequences for women can be dire… Greer’s book was not anti-feminist; she had simply reached another stage in her life…” [252]

Later, she again opened new ground in her discussion of older women: “The purpose of The Change, according to its author, was ‘to demonstrate that women are at least as interesting as men and the ageing women are at least as interesting as younger women.’ This statement raises the question: interesting to whom? Certainly not to men, for Greer also argued passionately that women who have reached the climacteric have ceased to be of interest to men, and this is a Good Thing. … When no longer interesting to men, women would at last be free to concentrate on becoming interesting to themselves, their sisters and, ultimately, even the world.” [301]

Greer could be disparaging about the limitations of contemporary self-styled feminists. “Matriarch Greer, schoolteacher Greer, had news for women of the younger generation. In some ways their lives may have become ‘nobler and richer’, but if they thought women were now the independent, liberated beings she had once thought they might become, they were deluding themselves. It was never about equality with men: … It was about women becoming the subjects of their own lives rather than the objects of other peoples’. Who would ever have thought, after the success of the first liberationists who marched on the Atlantic City Boardwalk in protest at the Miss America contest in 1969, that bigger, brighter, more glitzy pageants of that kind would endure into the twenty-first century?... What difference had it made that 103 female Labour politicians (lifestyle feminists all) were now ‘running around’ Parliament in ‘little red suits’ making the Palace of Westminster look ‘like a Butlin’s holiday camp’, when real power still rested with men? … ‘On every side we see women troubled, exhausted, mutilated, lonely, guilty, mocked by the headlined success of the few.’“ [316, 317]

When it came to transgender men who claimed to “identify as women” Greer seemingly also passed beyond her biographer’s comfort zone: “Being out of step was now new to her, but she was more used to being in the vanguard of popular opinion than behind it. Now it was starting to look as if she was stuck in a past age of prejudice and ignorance on a crucial matter of gender.. Many bright younger feminists rolled their eyes.” [316] Nevertheless, Kleinhenz faithfully records a number of classic Germaine Greer quotes which have become well worn memes on the internet. In particular, she records this one: “I’m getting a bit old for this. I’m 76. I don’t need to go down there and be screamed at and have things thrown at me. Bugger me, it’s not all that interesting or rewarding.” [p360]

And finally:

If God exists I am against him. I do not want to go to heaven. I do not want to live with God. I have lived with people who thought they were God and I definitely don’t want to be anywhere the real McCoy. [p367]

What everybody has accepted is the idea of equality feminism. As far as I’m concerned, equality is a profoundly conservative aim. It will change nothing.’ [p367]

Male values, she argues, are already destroying not only women, but people all over the world. Surely women should be opposing those values and asserting their own? [p375]

[Joel Everett]

Germaine: The Life of Germaine Greer was an unexpectedly delightful read. It was mostly her biography with an occasional medieval style gloss and commentary by the author Elizabeth Kleinhenz and a B plot that follows the life of a contemporary, with Greer, woman who consumes and is influenced by Germaine in her life choices.
What is revealed of Germain Greer is that of an immensely talented, at times conflicted, but always provocative self-styled feminist, not always well received by her co-feminists or colleagues, who broke new ground and influenced a generation of 2nd Wave Feminists with her manifesto and exhortation The Female Eunuch.
The biography though delves also into her difficulty, despite the stance of liberation, in forming relationships with those around her from her mother, to her friends, to her fellow academicians. Regardless of how one views Dr. Greer or her body of work one comes a way with a very human and multifaceted portrait of her; not in the sense of necessarily sympathizing with all her trials, but of empathizing with the general lot of the human condition.

I found this biography not only to be an insight into the iconoclast Germaine Greer, but also a sort of cultural history of the times; especially as it relates to 1960s and 70s and the counter cultural shifts that were happening at that time.

Elizabeth Kleinhenz has done an excellent job of capturing the life and times of Germaine Greer which is not an easy task as her Introduction makes abundantly clear. The biography book ends nicely with a lecture of Dr. Greer in celebration of her archive at the University of Melbourne from which the author pulled a substantial amount of material for use.

This might not be your cup of tea unless you are interested personally in the life of Germaine Greer or the overall history of 2nd Wave feminism, but if those two subject areas interest you then this is highly recommended. Even if you are not interested in feminism or the counter-cultural period this book might still be an interesting read and a hidden delight as it was for me.

[Rania T]

I first encountered Germaine Greer aged 11 via a Supplement for The Australian titled, "1969: The Year That Changed the World." On one of the pages was a black and white photograph of the 'untamed shrew' with the quote: "Greer: Can't you get your own tea?" in reference to a small paragraph in the same magazine about her three week marriage. For some reason, the quote was a little unnerving for me, as this woman had been reduced to those six words, and not much else was said about the literary impact she had on her generation at that time. She would then keep popping up here and there, even in fiction like the Adrian Mole series by Sue Townsend, in newspaper articles or on television. And, as fate would have it, she decided to pop up again.

Saying all that, Elizabeth Kleinhenz has done an excellent job in presenting Greer "as she is" and has done justice to all the archived materials on Greer by Greer, that are held at Melbourne Uni. Meticulous research that is cited is done in detail, as are little side stories that emerge from people that peppered Greer's life. She also makes the point that Greer is in some sense, a genius for the fact that she has always thought outside the box, and as a result has rubbed people up the wrong way, because of misunderstandings and the way she sees things. Germaine Greer is indeed more than the 'cup of tea' people have come to associate her with, as this work shows its readers.

[Danny]

After reading this book I have a much clearer understanding of the life of one of Australia's leading public intellectuals. Consistently controversial and contrarian, Melbourne-born Greer has never shied away from expressing her opinions. She is a complex and driven person. Alongside her gifted ex-pat Aussie cohort of Clive James, Robert Hughes, Barry Humphries, Martin Sharp and Richard Neville, she probably made the biggest splash in the biggest pond going. Her groundbreaking first book, 1970s The Female Eunuch, made her internationally famous and has provided a platform for her ever since.
Drawn from her archives at the University Of Melbourne, Kleinhenz has done an admirable job in illuminating a tricky and interesting person.

[Joy]

Ms Greer has chutzpah. She always has had, and always will have. It upsets people to have someone who feels quite comfortable being totally themselves, embracing every change in thought or opinion, and free enough to sashay through life without the need to explain themselves. With one breath society tells You to stay true and be brave enough to speak up, in the next breath they tell you to get back into your box, be silent and conform. I may not like nor agree with Ms Greer's attitude all of the time, but i admire her ability to stay true to herself. I don't feel this book diminishes Ms Greer at all. Not that she would care a toss any way. I found it an interesting and inspiring, account of a life well lived.

[Trina]

I loved reading this book! What a wonderful journey through the life, ideas and achievements of Germaine.

I am generally not a non-fiction reader. However, I am a historical fiction reader and I found this book extremely informative in bringing me up to date with some important history and understanding of how we arrived to this point.

Although I would not like Germaine or her company there were some very interesting and important points and recommendations that she consistently brought up in approaching achieving equality for women.

I personally feel a great deal of appreciation for Elizabeth in writing this book.

[Troy Kramer]

Overall the book was quite engaging, though I have to say that the last chapter lost me as a reader (the whole bit about the author getting angry at Germaine because of her notes to her editors, and then on the next page saying that it was ok and Germaine was doing the right thing "this time" read rushed and false to me).

Certainly the impression I got of Germaine from this book is that she is both intelligent and fascinating as well as being lonely and a bit nutters. Worth the read (just skip the last chapter, it adds absolutely nothing and detracts quite a bit).

[Fern Watson]

4.5 stars. I really enjoyed this book, more and more as it went along. What a woman! She is bright, very self-confident and powerful in her influence. Sadly, and interestingly, these features seemed to carry less and less weight as she got older. She is still an activist, and active, in her 80s now. I was both shocked and intrigued by how much sex was in her life - opened MY eyes to some of what was going on with younger people during the 1960s and 1970s!

[Sherry Mackay]

Mm not sure I know anything more about germaine than I did before I read this book. It’s very hands free and at arm’s length. Impersonal. And what’s with the fictional? character called cheryl who appears every so often for a couple of paragraphs? Made up? Certainly nonsensical and pointless. I’ll wait till germaine is dead to get a proper biography I guess. I end up feeling that Ms Greer is just not a very nice person and I don’t really care how intelligent she is.

[Lizz]

Germaine Greer has been popping up in other things I’ve read/consumed lately and this was on somebody’s “most anticipated” list, so I thought I’d check it out on Audible. Not really knowing anything about Dr. (excuse me, Professor) Greer going into this, I didn’t know what to expect. DNFd at less than 5% due to TERF nonsense. I decided I didn’t care to know.

[Barbara Phi]

I loved this book. It's well researched honest and deals with a difficult subject, Dr Greer is not always a cooperative subject, with kindness and insight. She also places Greer in the context of the many societies in which she lives. It's a close examination of the individual but also the societal context in which she lives.

[Sharon J]

Elizabeth Kleinhenz has written a very readable and interestingly lively account of Germaine Greer. While Germain Greer would have nothing to do with the author I was impressed by the insight she gleaned from all her research.

[Louise]

This book was given as a gift a long time ago and not something I had in mind to read, maybe that’s why I felt it unexciting, rambling at parts and a bit “pointless”. I could have just read the last chapter and been happy.

[Rhonda]

One sided.

[Anna O'Donnell]

Well written account of the life of Germaine Greer. Informative and honest.

[Beth]

Once again a biography that was written without the permission of the person it is about. I am finding more and more of these that solely depend on stacks and stacks of data found in the collection of personal papers filed away in a library archive from the person. For some reason addresses of where they live and how many times they go back and forth between the houses they own or rent frequently become the main point of the writing. Really I don't care, how many times they go back and forth from Spain to Italy to the US to Australia to the UK and back again. It gets a bit tedious. She is such an influential and complex person, there must be more. DNF