Bloomsbury Publishing will publish Germaine Greer’s controversial essay On Rape in September, while UK rights to Germaine by Elizabeth Kleinhenz have been snapped up by Scribe UK who will publish on 29 October 2018.
In On Rape, Greer argues that ‘centuries of writing and thinking about rape—as inflicted by men on women—have got us nowhere. The prosecution of a selected minority of cases seldom results in a conviction. The crucial issue is that of consent, which is thought by some to be easy to establish and by others as impossible.
‘Sexual assault does not diminish; relations between the sexes do not improve; litigation balloons. There has to be a better way,’ writes Greer.
News of the book was first reported by the Sydney Morning Herald in January as part of an interview exposing Greer’s controversial views criticising what she called the ‘whingeing’ #MeToo movement, two months before the MUT announcement was made.
Meanwhile, Germaine (from Scribe), is described as the first biography of the Australian feminist for two decades and draws on newly-released personal archives.
Beginning with Greer’s troubled early life in 1940s Melbourne, Germaine draws on ‘unprecedented’ access to her personal archives (opened at Melbourne University in 2016) tracing her career, relationships with men and women, her travels and her home life, and examines Greer’s work and ideas from The Female Eunuch to the #MeToo movement. It reveals how her public persona has shifted with time from ‘sixties trailblazer to present-day rabble-rouser’, and why she endures as a subject of fascination.
Sarah Braybrooke (Scribe) said: ‘Even today, decades after she first shot to fame, Greer’s impact is everywhere – from the recent BBC documentary about her to the Wooster Group play The Town Hall Affair, staged at the Barbican last month. But despite her frequent, provocative media appearances and vast body of work, the woman herself defies definition. In Germaine, Kleinhenz has succeeded in penning a biography which is fascinating in its subject matter but also balanced and thoughtful in the writing’
