Jonoton svift

Swift, Stella and Vanessa – an alternative view
Michael Foot, the late British politician and leader of the Labour Party, was a great admirer of Swift and wrote about him extensively. In Debts of Honour^[41] he cites with approbation a theory propounded by Denis Johnston that offers an explanation of Swift’s behavior towards Stella and Vanessa.
Pointing to contradictions in the received information about Swift’s origins and parentage, Johnston postulates that Swift’s real father was Sir William Temple's father, Sir John Temple who was Master of the Rolls in Dublin at the time. It is widely thought that Stella was Sir William Temple’s illegitimate daughter. So Swift was Sir William’s brother and Stella’s uncle. Marriage or close relations between Swift and Stella would therefore have been incest, an unthinkable prospect.
It follows that Swift could not have married Vanessa either without Stella appearing to be a cast-off mistress, which he would not contemplate. Johnston’s theory is expounded fully in his book In Search of Swift.^[42] He is also cited in the Dictionary of Irish Biography^[43] and the theory is presented without attribution in the Concise Cambridge History of English Literature.^[44]
Works
Swift was a prolific writer, notable for his satires. The most recent collection of his prose works (Herbert Davis, ed. Basil Blackwell, 1965–) comprises fourteen volumes. A recent edition of his complete poetry (Pat Rodges, ed. Penguin, 1983) is 953 pages long. One edition of his correspondence (David Woolley, ed. P. Lang, 1999) fills three volumes.