[In the following review, Maitland offers positive evaluation of The Change, though finds fault in Greer's lack of practical instruction.]

I am 41 years old; my menstrual cycle, which for over 20 years has behaved with discreet but impeccable regularity, has recently turned funny on me; I have odd pains in my wrist, and attacks of savage ill temper; my lovely daughter has left school, started being kind to me and departed for Paris. I am full of strange regrets (that I didn't have eight children, that I didn't become a contemplative nun) and strange desires (to live alone in the country, to scream very loudly in supermarkets). Last week I bought the shortest skirt I have worn since 1970. A woman not just of a “certain”, but of a “dangerous” age.

Now what? I ask, along with others who entered female adulthood to the trumpet blasts of liberation and the revolution, and read The Female Eunuch in 1970. And there are not a lot of answers, frankly, even if we can bear to ask the right questions. Not even medical answers, if Dr Greer is right; or rather, there are masses of answers, mainly contradictory, ill-proven, male-biased, and frequently dangerous to women's health.

The depth of ignorance and prejudice and guilt-inducing psychopoop ought to stagger us. It does not, of course, because we have had the same business with contraception and fertility and orgasm and childbirth and lesbianism and menstruation. Given how obsessed by women's bodies men are, it is continually fascinating how unbelievably ill-informed they remain: imagine a train spotter who couldn't distinguish between a steam engine and an Intercity 125.

In short, no one knows anything useful about the menopause at all: not what it is, what is going on, what helps, what is “healthy”. There isn't even an agreed list of symptoms, or a clear distinction between what is menopausal and what is, more simply, ageing.

Well, I shouldn't say no one. Germaine Greer, none of us will be surprised to discover, knows lots and tells it to us at considerable length (over 400 pages). This is Greer's best book for years: she is just right for the subject. At her best, she has always had a savage truculence, and at her worst a strident self-righteousness, combined with a maudlin romanticism. But the situation of the menopausal woman in western society calls for both truculence and self-confidence, and in the absence of almost any positive images of ourselves, a strong dollop of romanticism goes not amiss.

At the core of Greer's argument here lies her belief that sex is overrated. This flies in the face of modern orthodoxy, which preaches that heterosexual penetrative sex is good for you. Not to have it is bad for you, and not to want it proves that you are bad. Much treatment for menopausal symptoms is to keep your sexual bits, physical and psychological, in good working order for your man, who, against statistical odds, is dreamed into existence for everywoman. For example, the increase of both rage and independence found by some researchers is deemed pathological, instead of a sensible response to a grim reality.

The reality is that:

“The tiny nuclear family built about the copulating couple is unsafe for women and children. It is arguable that it is unsafe because of the primacy given to the sex relation between the couple, the maintenance of which may be thought to justify all kinds of distorted behaviour and certainly conflicts with the demands of small children.”

Women who want hormone replacement therapy and silicon breast implants, women who can't or won't live without sex, who refuse to grow up, all play into the hands of a self-defeating and degrading anophobia (irrational hatred of old women) which re-imprisons women at the very moment when they could be free.

“Don't buy it,” Greer tells us, which is good. And she is so good at telling us: funny and quick on the trial of double-think and self-satisfaction; sharp in the analysis of both ignorance and silence; full of information, perception and energy.

But then, she goes on. “Instead, be like me”, which is more dubious. Because, although she paints a rosy picture of herself as crone and witch, invisible on the street and strong in her head, renewed, freed, joyful (“Before I felt less on greater provocation; I lay in the arms of young men who loved me and felt less bliss than I do now”), she singularly fails to tell us how she got there. Her pages of excoriating contempt for Simone de Beauvoir's fear and hatred of age, for Marquez' sentimentalisation of geriatric intercourse, for medicos and silly women, for Joan Collins and Jane Fonda, are not matched with better strategies.

We need practical strategies at this point, and narratives. The witch and crone remain only archetypes, until they are placed in stories. We know the story of the witch: its moral is that “it is better to marry than to burn”. Greer claims to know a better story. I wish she would tell it; we get the happy ending, but not the plot. A few pages less on other women's failures to negotiate this passage, a few pages less of damning everyone everywhere, a few pages less of ecstatic utterance, and a little more about the nitty-gritty could have changed a useful book into a precious one.