The Life of Germaine Greer review – an elusive firebrand

Germaine Greer’s brilliance and taste for controversy still don’t make her an easy quarry for biographer Elizabeth Kleinhenz

To say that Germaine Greer is no fan of biography is an understatement. She’s said: “I fucking hate biography. If you want to know about Dickens, read his fucking books”. She also called her previous biographer, Christine Wallace (author of 1997’s Untamed Shrew), a “parasite” and “brain-dead hack”. Which must have put a crimp in her fellow Australian Elizabeth Kleinhenz’s attempts to encapsulate “one of the most important radical and controversial women of 20th- and 21st-century feminism” and persuade people to talk about her.

Some people did talk (Fay Weldon among them), but Kleinhenz seems to have been left rather dependent on the 82-metre-long Germaine Greer archive at the University of Melbourne (Greer was paid $3m for the archive, donating the money to her Rainforest charity).

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2KcSMW6
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