[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 together by a prologue and an epilogue. There is a chapter on the Muse, one on “The Transvestite Poet” (androgyny and cross-gender impersonation on and off the page), and several devoted to individual cases, including Sappho's textual history and a long study of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, billed as “the story of the exploitation and destruction of an extremely talented but uneducated young middle-class woman at the hands of the London literary establishment of the 1820s and 1830s”.

On the whole, Greer is sympathetic to her and her like. If they were under-educated that was not their fault; if they messed up their careers and led miserable lives, that is understandable. Success went to their heads, and they were culturally conditioned to be easily manipulated by their mentors.

The status of the woman poet varied. In 16th-century Italy, Vittoria Colonna was praised without condescension. English-speaking societies were more sexist; and the more women wrote, the greater the threat. “It is only when women begin to make inroads on the male preserves”, writes Greer, “that sophisticated strategies of devaluation begin to be employed.”

In the 17th century the Duchess of Newcastle was a figure of fun. Pepys called her “a mad, conceited, ridiculous woman”. Her contemporary versifiers took more care over their self-presentation, apologising humbly and irrationally for publishing at all. Many burned their juvenile poetic efforts. Poetry was seen as an excusable indiscretion in the young, to be avoided later—in the 18th century, most known poetry by women was written in their youth. The approved subject was religion; meekness was all. Those who stepped outside the boundaries got into various kinds of trouble.

It is not news that for centuries women poets have been undervalued, misrepresented and exploited by men—although the case histories here make grimly fascinating reading. More controversial is the other main strand in Greer's argument: her claim that women poets cooperated in their own downfall. They took bad advice; they fell for flattery; they wrote too fast and without revising sufficiently; and they failed to understand “what was involved in making a poem”. Their difficulty was not in finding a publisher—hundreds of them were published, some to enormous acclaim—but in “taking poetry seriously”. Hence their work seldom reached the high standards aspired to by dedicated male poets.

There's plenty to argue with here (these failings were not confined to women, for example). But it is the epilogue that is perhaps calculated to provoke the greatest outcry. Greer complains that: “Too many of the most conspicuous figures in women's poetry in the 20th century not only destroyed themselves … but are valued for poetry that documents that process.” She'd rather have them alive, without the poetry.

As a lead-in to her roll-call of suicides—Charlotte Mew, Sara Teasdale, Amy Levy, Anna Wickham, Robin Hyde, Marina Tsvetaeva, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton—she cites Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who went about the process gradually. Self-starvation and drug abuse killed her off in a more socially acceptable fashion. (The deterioration of her marriage dated from the publication of her passionate Sonnets from the Portuguese, written for her husband but concealed from him until three years after the wedding. Such a typically “female” outpouring of emotion was too much for him: “That was a strange, heavy crown, that wreath of Sonnets,” he wrote to a friend.

Then follow the 20th-century examples. The list is selective, but it certainly carries weight. Greer does not forget the male “confessional” poets who went in for self-destructive behaviour, but only one, John Berryman, happened to die by his own hand. Women were less cautious; we get Anne Sexton's famous account of how she and Plath, sitting over drinks after classes with Lowell, “talked of death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb”. As Greer more or less admits, two such self-obsessed individuals were hardly likely to settle into contented normality, poets or not.

Surely, then, poetry was merely a chance instrument? (Think of all the self-destructive women in Hollywood or the music industry). But no: “I would argue”, says Greer, “that poetry as presented by the male literary establishment … enticed the woman poet to dance upon a wire … and ultimately to come to grief”.

Others will argue back. No consensus will be reached, and Greer will enjoy the hubbub. On the earlier poets, though, she has dared to say what most of us secretly believed: there was never a female Milton, Donne or Pope (let alone Shakespeare). This book illuminates some of the reasons why: the ebb and flow of pressures on women poets, the rise and fall of reputations. But they will stay in the canon, and perhaps we may read them with greater understanding.