The writer and academic, Germaine Greer, was in Galway at the Cuirt International Festival of Literature when the news broke yesterday that she had been attacked earlier in the week.
Police were called to Ms Greer's home in Great Chesterford, near Saffron Walden, Essex, after she was allegedly assaulted and held captive for up to an hour on the evening of Easter Monday.
Police said the 61-year-old writer had not been seriously injured but was "badly shaken".
A 19-year-old woman was arrested and charged with unlawful imprisonment and assault occasioning actual bodily harm. She is due to appear before magistrates in Harlow, Essex, on May 4th.
There was a defensive quality to her lecture on Wednesday night in the Town Hall Theatre. She detailed the different ways in which her life had been misrepresented in nine books summed up in the title: "You don't own yourself".
She said all "non-fiction" was written from a subjective point of view and therefore fictional, and there was no way of stopping people "seeing me in different ways". She spoke out against lives being "cannibalised" by writers, however, and said that for her, life was always more important than any piece of writing. "As a writer," she said, "you don't have a right to destroy other people's lives." She added that the humanity of a person was always deeper and more surprising than a written account could convey, and that writing about people still alive was a "vile business".
She banned photographers from the lecture and was not available for comment in Galway. Next Friday, she will discuss the evolution of her feminist thinking at the Cathederal Quarter Festival in Belfast.
Ms Greer is professor of comparative literature at Warwick University and became a household name after writing the seminal feminist text, The Female Eunuch, which was published in 1970.
In 1994 she offered the homeless an opportunity to stay with her via an open invitation in the English magazine for the homeless, The Big Issue.
She wrote: "If you are homeless and think you can accept what is being offered in the spirit in which it is being offered, write to me care of this paper."