[In the following review, Maitland offers unfavorable assessment of The Madwoman's Underclothes.]

When I was an undergraduate I heard Germaine Greer speak: she was indeed weird and wonderful and, as it turned out, the evening transformed my life. A short while later I bought a copy of The Female Eunuch and pored over it—alone and with others—and thus she was the instrument, if the image may be so pressed, of my birthing into feminism. I owe her a debt of gratitude which I suspect is shared by many women, even though I am sure that if I read the book again I would be appalled by its contents and amazed at the impact that it had on me.

I relate all this anecdotal stuff only because it explains how I come to approach The Madwoman's Underclothes with the sort of tolerance that is normally reserved for beloved but slightly senile old ladies. I truly want to do the best I can for her, as I attempt to make something coherent out of this collection of her ‘essays and occasional writings, 1968-1985’. Because, dear God, she really is bonkers. What we see in the progression through these 50 or so pieces of, predominantly, journalistic writing is libertarian individualism running amok and ending up not in anarchic chaos, as our elders and betters once feared, but in a manic individualism which is frequently charming, occasionally brilliant and fundamentally arrogant and patronising. Right from the beginning in the Oz pieces of the late 1960s she conflated ‘doing your own thing’ with ‘political revolution’. ‘To kill a man is simply murder: it is revolution to turn him on.’ (Go tell that to the ANC or, indeed, any serious revolutionary, even a feminist one.)

Perhaps it is not really fair to hold such youthful expressions against anyone but, first, Greer has chosen to reissue these burblings and, second, in them lie the seeds of her improbable present conviction: that she is the only person in the world who has got it right. These papers cover an enormous diversity of subjects, from vaginal deodorants to the distribution of aid in Ethiopia, with underclothes, premenstrual syndrome, cosmetic surgery and transexualism thrown in, and in none of these articles does anyone, by name or by ideology, come in for any praise (except possibly the Cuban women's organisation who, they'll be glad to hear, are doing more or less okay). Well, not no one—there is one person who knows where it's at and will be pleased to correct you, and that is Dr Greer herself. Most recently she has taken up the causes of various victim groups, as she sees them, in the Third World. It is not her sincerity that is in doubt here; it is her conviction that no one else in the whole of the West is sincere. And interestingly she ends up speaking of them exactly as Victorian men spoke of women: they are purer, nobler in their suffering and poverty than we can ever be; they are ‘closer to nature’ and able to teach us moral truths so long as we do not contaminate them with our evil materialism; they are too innocent to know what they really need, but luckily they have Greer to tell them.

Despite my delight in her stunt acts, my old debt and my agreement with so many things she says, none of this is enough. Feminism was born out of libertarianism and has had to struggle to grow out of it, to replace manic individualism with solidarity and discipline itself with political analysis. Of course we need that crazy flamboyance too, but Greer does not write like someone who is auditioning for the role of Court Jester, more like someone applying for the job of God. Frankly, despite the mess we are in—which she so often notes perceptively—this career opportunity is not currently being advertised.