Jonathan Swift: A Portrait [Hardcover]

Victoria Glendinning (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: May 4, 1999

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

"What I am writing is not a chronicle biography," cautions Victoria Glendinning of Jonathan Swift, but rather what the early-18th-century satirist and his contemporaries would have thought of as a "character," a prose portrait in which, as she puts it, Glendinning "[circles] a little, gradually zooming in on the man himself, until the central questions about him can finally be confronted in close-up."

Swift (1667-1745) is best known to many as the author of Gulliver's Travels; for others, he is more vividly remembered for A Modest Proposal, in which--with the textual equivalent of a deadpan expression--he offered Ireland's British rulers a solution to Irish overpopulation and poverty:

I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or a ragout.

Glendinning quotes extensively from Swift's prose and poetry, probing the political and aesthetic sensibilities that led him to such dark assessments of human nature, but she is just as strong--if not stronger--in her assessment of the two great romantic relationships in his life, with Esther Johnson ("Stella") and Hester Vanhomrigh ("Vanessa"). Here she draws upon extensive epistolary evidence, as well as contemporary accounts of the affairs. While there are some questions that cannot be conclusively answered--Were Swift and Stella secretly married? Did he ever consummate his relationship with Vanessa?--the ways in which Glendinning frames the possibilities make Swift come alive for modern readers, restoring a personality of great depth and complexity to a figure many know only by the name on a single book's title page. --Ron Hogan

From Publishers Weekly

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.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 324 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (May 4, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805061681
• ISBN-13: 978-0805061680
• Product Dimensions: 14.7 x 9.1 x 4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,839,856 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An ordinary biography about an extraordinary man, May 11, 1999

By 

Wayne Jones - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jonathan Swift: A Portrait (Hardcover)

This is an ordinary biography about an extraordinary man. Swift is the author of some of the greatest satires ever written -- funny, vicious, scatological -- full of the strength of conviction and powered by a great command of the English language. A lot of that comes through in this biography by Victoria Glendinning, but a lot of it does not.

One of the main annoyances with this book is that there is too much of the biographer in it. The biographer talks about the process of her research. She peppers the book with many instances of "I think" and "I believe", often without any indication of why she thinks or believes these things. The reader is sometimes left concluding: why does her perception of things have any more credence than anyone else's? How has she proved her case?

Glendinning's analyses of some of Swift's work also often seem a little thin and obvious. Granted, she does not have the space to provide in-depth literary criticism, but the assessments she does provide are so thin sometimes that the reader feels he could do without them altogether. The same applies to her mini-critiques of the former biographers of Swift.

The book is not all bad though. The writing style is good and plain, and she does not engage in too many speculations based on slender biographical data. She does not "make things up", does not try to paint the (imagined) scene just so the reader can have "atmosphere". The book is readable and the most of the basic facts about Swift's life are there.

The book ends on a bad note with the last chapter, however, with Glendinning engaging in some generalizations about Swift's life and about literary art which come off as very judgmental and facile.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars PARTLY INTERESTING PARTLY TEDIOUS, July 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Jonathan Swift: A Portrait (Hardcover)

Glendenning's follows an excellent life of Trollope with a soso effort on another writer who spent a lot of time in both Ireland and England- Jonathan Swift. The book is a curious effort... she calls it a portrait but its more an impressionistic portrait then a realistic biography. She dismisses the standard biographical form with an 8 page summary of Swift's life in chapter one. Her style than is more thematatic than chronological and for the newcomer to Swifts life this is confusing... Stella appears and then disapears for many pages...Glendenning is best discusing Swift's literary life in London from 1710-4 when he hung with Pope and Dr. Arbuthnot. These pages are informative as is the discussion of Swift's relationship with William Temple, his benefactor. Overall, Glendenning's effort is tiresome. She does not appear to have much sustained interest in Swift or to really have enjoyed his books.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Well written personal view, May 10, 2003

By 

PeterAnson "xpeteransonx" (Marbach am Neckar) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Jonathan Swift: A Portrait (Hardcover)

This is no day by day chronicle of a life. Rather, a gerneral view and personal description, 'what Swift is to me'. Once this premise is accepted, the book reads easily, the style is great,the few pictures helpful. The author can be seem to be opinionated or not, but she is always in the background. I had a great time reading this,and I knew very little of Swift beforhand. Now I would like to travel to Dublin, so I guess the book achieved at least something...