SOURCE: "Patriarchal Poetry and Women Readers: Reflections on Milton's Bogey," Publications of the Modern Language Association, Vol. LXXXXIII, No. 3, May, 1978, pp. 368-81.

In the following essay, Gilbert studies the influence of Paradise Lost on female writers.

To resusrrect "the dead poet who was Shakespeare's sister," Virginia Woolf declares in A Room of One's Own, literate women must "look past Milton's bogey, for no human being should shut out the view." The perfunctory reference to Milton is curiously enigmatic, for the allusion has had no significant prior development, and Woolf, in the midst of her peroration, does not stop to explain it. Yet the context in which she places this apparently mysterious bogey is highly suggestive. Shutting out the view, Milton's bogey cuts women off from the spaciousness of possibility, the predominantly male landscapes of fulfillment Woolf has been describing throughout A Room. Worse, locking women into "the common...