In "Jane Eyre and the Secrets of Furious Lovemaking" (1998) Sandra M. Gilbert recounts how she was surprised to find herself theorizing about a novel in 1975. She explains that ever since she was a child she had always considered herself a "poetry person," having published four collections of poetry. She had, as she puts it, "sworn only to write, on the one hand, Meaningful Books and, on the other hand, literary journalism (Meaningful Reviews and Significant 'Think-Pieces'), and never, never to start grinding out academic hack articles like what Henry James once called 'an old sausage mill.'" Yet, in 1975 she found herself contemplating an article about the novel Jane Eyre. That article became the seed for the influential The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), written by Gilbert and Susan Gubar. With the publication of this work, Gilbert embarked on a prolific...