Books > Language & Literature > Literature: history & criticism > Literary studies > 16th to 18th centuries
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Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women (Hardcover)
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Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women (Hardcover)
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Jonathan Swift was the subject of gossip and criticism in his own
time concerning his relations with women and his representations of
them in his writings. For over twenty years he regarded Esther
Johnson, "Stella," as "his most valuable friend," yet he is reputed
never to have seen her alone. From his time to our own there has
been speculation that the two were secretly married--since their
relationship seemed so inexplicable then and now. For thirteen of
the years that Swift seemed committed to Stella as the acknowledged
woman in his life, he maintained a clandestine--but apparently also
nonsexual--relationship with another woman, Esther Van Homrigh, or
"Vanessa." Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women looks again at
these much-examined relationships and at others that reveal Swift
as a man who enjoyed the company of a number of women as pupils and
as ministrants to his various needs.
Swift, a man with a complex private life, was also a writer whose
satiric portraits of women could be unsparing. While Swift often
criticized women for frivolous pastimes and idle chatter, his most
notorious texts on women image their bodies as loathsome: as he
once wrote in a serious political tract, a woman is a "nauseous,
unwholesome carcass." Such representations cross a line by showing
a repugnance for women as a sex, the biological other. They have
led, not surprisingly, to repeated charges of misogyny, an issue
that Jonathan Swift in the Company of Women addresses at some
length. This first book-length treatment of Swift and women
comprehensively examines Swift's attitude toward women in all their
manifestations in his work and life: as intimates, acquaintances,
proteges, wives, mothers, nurses, disobedient daughters, young
women who marry older men, and--finally--as poets and critics.
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