SOURCE: “Killed with Kindness,” in New Statesman and Society, October 6, 1995, pp. 37-8.

In the following review, Adcock outlines and analyzes Greer's theses in Slip-Shod Sibyls.

This long, scholarly book seems destined to be received simply as another instance of Germaine Greer putting the boot into feminists, this time by firing at some of their icons and questioning the place in the literary canon of most poetry by women before the present. Sappho is a myth; Katherine Philips, the “Matchless Orinda”, let her work be rewritten by male advisers; Aphra Behn was not a self-sufficient woman of letters but a victim; Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, like many 20th-century successors, were neurotic self-destroyers.

These are over-simplifications—mine, not Greer's. In fact, her book offers several distinct theses about the difficulties under which female poets laboured. This is not a unified survey but a series of separate monographs held...