Revealed: Germaine Greer's 30,000-word love letter to Martin Amis, a lover who left her 'helpless with desire'

In 2013 the feminist author sold her lifetime archive to the University of Melbourne. This September, after the cache was opened up to scholars for the first time, journalist and academic Margaret Simons made a startling discovery: a passionate letter to Amis, written in 1976, that was never actually sent

Germaine Greer in 1982, six years after writing 30,000 words in ‘The Long Letter to a Short Love, or ... ’ to Martin Amis. Photograph: Jane Bown

Gay Alcorn

Tuesday 17 November 2015 

Germaine Greer opened a notebook at Heathrow airport and began to write a letter to her lover. It was 1 March 1976 and Greer was on her way to Boston for the start of a gruelling lecture tour of the US and Canada.

On the first page of the notebook she wrote a title: “The Long Letter to a Short Love, or … ” Greer never came up with an alternative name, but for the next fortnight she wrote furiously and passionately to the writer Martin Amis, 30,000 words in all.

Greer, then 37 and already famous as the author of The Female Eunuch, is believed to have never sent the notebook to Amis. At the time he was 26, working as a journalist at the New Statesman and had just published his second novel. Greer was in love with him and the affair had only just begun.

The Australian journalist and academic Margaret Simons discovered Greer’s remarkable letters to Amis among the thousands of personal documents Greer sold to the University of Melbourne in 2013. Simon’s essay on what these letters reveal about one of the most influential feminists pouring out her private thoughts to one of the most gifted novelists of the era will be published in the Australian literary journal Meanjin in December.

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