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. "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 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. 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, in