SOURCE: “Notes of a Nag and a Roisterer,” in New York Times Book Review, October 11, 1987, p. 14.

In the following review, Blandford offers positive assessment of The Madwoman's Underclothes.

Germaine Greer has never truly been a writer. Her spirit has illuminated her written word as if the very act of expressing herself were but a brief, rushed gathering-up of her living. She is, perhaps, one of the marvelous letter writers of an age that no longer trifles with them much. Her essays, columns and books—transcripts as they are of a heroic heart and intellect—seem to have been dashed off in the fire and dispatched to her many sisters. Feminism as a literary family.

To come unawares upon The Madwoman's Underclothes, a collection of her essays from 1968 to 1985, is to intrude unexpectedly into another's family reunion. All those private jokes, shared memories, intimate confidences, demands and contradictions: a...