Jonathan Swift: A Portrait - Hardcover

Glendinning, Victoria

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805061681 ISBN 13: 9780805061680

Publisher: Henry Holt and Co., 1999

Synopsis

A prize-winning biographer tells the story of the immortal Swift.

Poet, polemicist, pamphleteer, and wit, Swift is the master of shock. His furious satirical responses to the corruption and hypocrisy he saw around him in private and public life in eighteenth-century England and Ireland have every relevance for our own times. His black imagination, and his preoccupation with the foulness that lies beneath the thin veneer of artifice and civilization, gave a new adjective-Swiftian-to the lexicon of criticism. Jonathan Swift is best known as the author of Gulliver's Travels, and like his Gulliver in the land of Lilliput, Swift is a problem in perspective and scale. Victoria Glinning has taken a literary zoom lens to illuminate this proud and intractable man. She investigates at close range the main events and relationships of Swift's life, providing a compelling and provocative portrait set in a rich tapestry of controversy and paradox. Yeats said famously that he saw Swift round every corner, that his ghost survived.

About this title

About the Author

Victoria Glinning is the highly praised author of biographies of Vita Sackville-West, Edith Sitwell, Elizabeth Bowen, Rebecca West, and Anthony Trollope (winner of the Whitbread Award in 1992). She lives in London.

Reviews

A lively, discursive distillation of the Swiftian essentials from Swift's own life. Given that popular biographies of Swift began shortly after his death and that serious, scholarly ones now come out with regularity, Whitbread-winning biographer and novelist Glendinning (Anthony Trollope, 1993, etc.) approaches the enigmatic, contradictory Dr. Swift with both thorough research and a light tone. Her aim, she declares, is to write ``what was in Swift's time called a `character'a written portrait'' rather than a full biographyand the result is as gossipy and acute as one of John Aubrey's brief lives. Swift's celebrity, whether as an Irish patriot or the author of Gulliver's Travels, gets a quick overhaul as Glendinning portrays the talented but unconnected young man of letters in Augustan coffee houses and Tory circles and later the unwilling exile to Ireland, having failed to win the worldly success of his mentor, Sir William Temple. While his early satires, A Tale of a Tub and The Battle of the Books, and his political pamphleteering for Queen Anne's Tories get short treatment, Glendinning vividly conveys the atmosphere of Augustan literary circles and the Tory corridors of power, which Swift eventually managed to penetrate with a combination of wit and perseverance. Swift's disappointed ambition when the Whigs took power with George I becomes in Glendinning's view his ruling passion, which even the successes of The Drapier's Letters and Gulliver would never quite dispel. If her take has obvious psychological limitswhich are not expanded by digressive speculations about Swift's parentage, his relations with Esther ``Stella'' Johnson and Hester ``Vanessa'' Vanhomrigh, and a possible clandestine marriage to the formerit produces a sharply defined and intriguing ``character.'' ``Like his Gulliver,'' Glendinning concludes, ``Swift is always too big or small for the company he keeps,'' but she at least puts him into some proportion to his life and times. (8 pages b&w illustrations, not seen) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Aiming to evoke Swifts character rather than to give a comprehensiveor linearaccount of his life, Glendinning (Electricity, a novel; Rebecca West, a Life) captures the great 18th-century writers witty, cantankerous personality and his lifelong frustrations. The man who wrote Gullivers Travels, one of the greatest prose satires in the English language, died disappointed, sure that his best chance in lifemoving up the church hierarchyhad been missed, due to the tepidness of his allies in high places. Glendinnings Swift cant understand that the very qualitiesacid wit, uncompromising honesty, personal oddity and awkwardnessthat made him a brilliant, and unique, writer (and an attractive subject to biographers) undermined his ability to ingratiate himself with his superiors. Glendinning runs into trouble with her decision to forgo a traditional structure in favor of what was in Swifts time called a charactera written portrait. She seems unclear who her audience is, at times assuming a familiarity with Swifts poems, and then giving a lengthy summary of Gulliver. But at other times, her speculative method pays off, when she lends equal weight to conflicting accounts. She muses about the reasons that Swift either did or did not secretly marry the love of his life, Stella (aka Esther Johnson): Were they, for instance, secretly related, as the illegitimate children of Swifts mentor, Sir William Temple? But when it comes to sexual matters, shes more reticent. A bit too self-consciously, Glendinning often starts down one path, interrupts herself with a no, and then moves off in another direction. Inconsistencies such as these ultimately mar an otherwise intriguing portrait.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

If, as playwright Joe Orton thought, Swift's life is more interesting than his writing, then Glendinning, though differing with Orton, goes to the heart of the matter. The author of Gulliver's Travels had a peculiar, contradiction-filled life. Born after his father's death, Swift grew up separated from his mother. He had two famous relationships with younger women, whom he called Stella and Vanessa, that were probably entirely chaste, though each woman desired marriage. Ordained an Anglican cleric, he strove for a good post in England instead of his native Ireland. But, too closely associated with the short-lived Tory government of Harley and St. John, and too skeptical and satirical about the church and religion in print, he got only the deanship of St. Patrick's Cathedral in Dublin. He loathed Ireland yet, highly sensitive to injustice, ferociously polemicized against English exploitation and was acclaimed as an Irish patriot. Further, he may have been his first patron's nephew (or son), may have married Stella, and may have consummated with Vanessa. A very interesting life, indeed. Ray Olson

A study of the Irish author and clergyman (1667-1745), this latest work by British literary biographer Glendinning is distinguished from more detailed biographies of Swift by its being more a written portrait than a chronicle. Glendinning examines various aspects of his life, times, and works for the purpose of trying to discover Swift's true character and how his traits, such as pride, illuminate his relationships with others and the way he viewed humankind. Chapters are devoted to Swift's complex relations with "Stella" and "Vanessa," his preoccupation with bodily functions, his religious and political views, and speculations on his parentage and whether he was married to Esther Johnson. By the end of this study, we begin to understand the author of Gulliver's Travels, and though we may not like Swift, we do respect his mind and character. For most public and undergraduate library collections.AMorris Hounion, New York City Technical Coll. Lib., Brooklyn
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0805061681
• ISBN 13: 9780805061680
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 324