This unauthorized biography of Germaine Greer is drawn from interviews with Greer's family, friends and former colleagues and from her many autobiographical writings. A courageous, contradictory, often tormented woman is revealed, variously scholar, groupie, bohemian, lover of cats and feminist.

She reveals a courageous, contradictory, often tormented woman, variously (and often simultaneously) scholar, rock stars' groupie, bohemian, lover of cats and gardening, and a feminist who spurned and then yearned for motherhood. An icon of women's liberation yet fiercely competitive and scathing of other women; a swashbuckling adventuress yet often vulnerable and surprisingly passive in her dealings with men; an inveterate self-dramatist yet incorrigibly honest, Greer has always lived by extremes - and the risks she took have allowed shoals of moderate feminists to swim in her wake. Many followers have been rebuffed by her reckless inconsistency - a quality she shares with Byron, her first literary love, stemming from a rare determination to be true to the moment. This biography puts into context the unhappy childhood, the convent schooling and promiscuous but rigorous university years that shaped Greer's powerful personality and restless intelligence. Child of the beat generation, leader (and victim?) of the 60s sexual revolution, she continues to assail our complacency as she approaches her 60th year.