Jonathan Swift

September 30, 2013
In his latest, Harvard literature professor and veteran biographer Damrosch (Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius) recounts the life of satirist Jonathan Swift, author of Gulliver’s Travels. The outlines of Swift’s life are more or less familiar. To render a novel account of Swift’s biography, then, Damrosch investigates myths and assumptions about such vexed questions as Swift’s disappointed political ambitions, his moral and religious views, and his love affairs. These last come in for special scrutiny, as Damrosch carefully weighs the evidence of Swift’s romantic attachments and possible marriages. Just as importantly, the author analyzes the political landscape of early 18th-century England in order to illuminate how Swift transmuted contemporary events into biting satire in an era in which wit could have fatal consequences. While Damrosch is to be credited for entertaining alternatives to outdated biographical shibboleths, his polemics against previous biographers and his reliance upon hypotheticals lead to a work rather academic in scope and occasionally needling in tone. Nonetheless, this is an impressive feat of scholarship filled with insightful readings of Swift’s work, as well as extensive illustrations that help to vivify the world of this satiric master. Illus. Agent: Tina Bennett, William Morris.

January 1, 2014
A feisty, first-class life of the sage and scourge of English Literature. Besides being a great essayist, satirist, novelist and poet, Jonathan Swift (1667-1745) was a very public man: a social-climbing Anglican minister, a friend to Alexander Pope, a competitor of Daniel Defoe and Laurence Sterne, a stalwart nationalist of Ireland--where he would be consigned to live--and a man whose shifting political allegiances forced him to publish his fiercest critiques anonymously (if only just barely). He masked himself in other ways, as well, leaving behind enough private contradictions and obscurities to keep biographers busy to this day. Damrosch (Literature/Harvard Univ.; Tocqueville's Discovery of America, 2010, etc.) is bent on both correcting the record and adding to it, creating a fresh and vivid life even as he wrestles with previous biographers--namely Irvin Ehrenpreis--along the way. Damrosch explores the mystery of Swift's parentage as well as his concealed Betty-and-Veronica relationships, one with the loving and devoted "Stella" (Hester Johnson)--whom he may have secretly married and who is buried next to him--and one with the temptress "Vanessa" (Esther Vanhomrigh). Damrosch also amply scrutinizes Swift's inner life: Was this preacher who absolutely insisted on churchly tithes even a true believer? Was Gulliver's Travels misanthropic or, as Methodist founder John Wesley suggested, an honest examination of mankind at its worst? Damrosch gets close to Swift as both a talented author and a man, detailing his frustrations, habits and multiple physical torments from deafness, vertigo and a variety of odd ailments. ("The spots increased every day and had little pimples, which are now grown white and full of corruption, though small...I cannot be sick like other people," he wrote, "but always something out of the common way.") This is the kind of biography where you come to feel you know the subject personally. A rich and rewarding portrait of an irreplaceable genius.

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December 1, 2013

Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), Irish novelist, essayist, satirist, cleric, and poet, was a man of mystery and great intellectual heft, as Damrosch (Ernest Bernbaum Research Professor of Literature, Harvard; Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Restless Genius) demonstrates. He asserts that while Swift's best-known work, Gulliver's Travels, is universally recognized, it is often mistaken for a fairy tale when in fact it masks a revolutionary political view of Swift's native Ireland. Damrosch seeks here to round out the version of the author presented in Irvin Ehrenpreis's Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age, asking questions about his private affairs: Did Swift have a secret marriage to his housekeeper's daughter? Damrosch raises issues about Swift's life and clarifies fact from fiction, providing insight into the writer and the time and place he inhabited. VERDICT Irish history buffs and literati alike will need to read this work.--Elizabeth Heffington, Lipscomb Univ. Lib., TN

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