Vol. 17 No. 24 · 14 December 1995
pages 14-15 | 3134 words
Poxy Doxies
Margaret Anne Doody
- Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet by Germaine Greer
Viking, 517 pp, £20.00, September 1995, ISBN 0 670 84914 6
This is an interesting, infuriating, brilliant, maddening book. In short, it is a work by Germaine Greer, who prefers (or so one sometimes thinks) anything to stagnation. The title is taken from Pope, whose Virgilian Sibyl in the Dunciad is the modern female British poet as satire liked to see her. Possessed by the muse or Apollo though they claim to be, women as poets are untidy, slovenly, careless of housekeeping. They are, like Virgil’s harpies, truly dirty beings. (Try saying ‘slip-shod sibyl’ and you will find that tongue-twisting tempts other words to come through.) The shit-soiled sibyl, the woman poet, is a hackney, a prostitute. If she receives you in her boudoir, you find she is a strumpet, affected, grimly bedizened perhaps, but poverty-stricken. She is always in a state of undress, of unattractive undress, slapping loose about the house in her slippers, her rhyme and metre shuffling loosely along.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 18 No. 1 · 4 January 1996
From Keith Flett
When Margaret Anne Doody (LRB, 14 December 1995) complains of Germaine Greer’s latest book that she doesn’t know which side of the ‘fence to jump down on’, well why should she? Eclecticism and idiosyncrasy, not putting things in boxes, are two of the most valuable things that the upheavals of 1968 taught us. Germaine Greer is at least sometimes, if only by accident, on the right side.
Keith Flett
London N17
Vol. 18 No. 2 · 25 January 1996
From Penny McCarthy
It was standard practice in the 16th and 17th centuries to abjure responsibility for allowing one’s work to be published. So if Katherine Phillips did supply the printer with copy and pretend to be furious when it was published, as Margaret Anne Doody describes in her review of Germaine Greer’s Slip-Shod Sibyls (LRB, 14 December 1995), she would have been following the precedent of many male writers (but not of her two most illustrious women predecessors, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, and her niece Mary Wroth, who acknowledged their part in the publication of their works, the latter even though hers created a scandal). Nicholas Breton complains in the Preface to the second edition of his Pilgrimage to Paradise (1592) that the edition of the year before ‘was donne altogether without my consent or knowledge’ and that ‘I know not how he’, the printer, ‘came by’ such ‘toies’. Samuel Daniel professed to be outraged that his and Philip Sidney’s secrets were ‘bewraied’ by the greedy printer who published the Astrophel and Stella of 1591. In tact, in the body of the poems he more or less confesses to having engineered the publication, though modern criticism has naively believed his protestations.
Penny McCarthy
Tokyo
