Australian-born Germaine Greer (b. 1939) moved to the UK in 1964 to study at Cambridge University and completed her PhD thesis, The Ethic of Love and Marriage in Shakespeare’s Early Comedies, in 1968. Just two years later, the publication of her watershed feminist blockbuster The Female Eunuch took her from respected literary scholar to firebrand intellectual superstar.
The Female Eunuch is an angry, funny and often bawdy blend of radical feminist polemic and sharp literary criticism. It comprises a damning review of contemporary society’s structural problems and an urgent call to fix them. Several of the ‘blurb’ comments on the back cover of the first paperback edition (Paladin 1971) reveal much about the cultural context into which the text exploded: the Guardian described the book as a ‘detailed exposition, of chilling clarity, that guarantees a cosmic persecution complex to any woman reading it’, while the Evening Standard labelled it a ‘manual of self-help for women-kind. How to learn to stop nagging, crabbing and grabbing and make your own life.’ The book was, of course, designed to be controversial, polemical and shocking. In her sparky introduction, Greer notes gleefully:
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