Jonathan Swift: A Portrait

Angeline Goreau

The Swift who tap-danced so engagingly around meaning grew out of a remarkably long and complicated life....If her biography succeeds in getting at the truth about Swift...it is because Glendinning has the good sense to suggest rather than insist, to wonder rather than conclude, to leave the contradictions and paradoxes just as they are — and fall in with the dean's godson, Thomas Sheridan the younger, who thought that ''perhaps there never was a man whose true character was so little known.''
— The New York Times Book Review \

Atlantic Monthly

A biographer of Swift does not suffer from want of material....[; one] who can resist the opportunity for elaborate sexual guesswork should be much admired.

John Derbyshire

[Swift's] great satire takes to preposterous extremes the weaknesses of humanity at large and supplies us with ready parallels for most of the instances of pride, fully, and cussedness that we encounter in our passage through the world.
—National Review

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's 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. (May)

Library Journal

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.--Morris Hounion, New York City Technical Coll. Lib., Brooklyn

The Atlantic Monthly

A biographer of Swift does not suffer from want of material....[; one] who can resist the opportunity for elaborate sexual guesswork should be much admired.

Kirkus 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 biography—and 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 limits—which are not expanded by digressive speculations about Swift's parentage, his relations with Esther "Stella" Johnson and Hester "Vanessa" Vanhomrigh, and apossible clandestine marriage to the former—it 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)