SOURCE: A review of The Madwoman in the Attic, in American Literature, Vol. 52, No. 1, March, 1980, pp. 128–32.

In the following review, Kolodny praises The Madwoman in the Attic for opening up a new way to read women writers, but regrets that the authors, despite their fine chapter on Emily Dickinson, do not distinguish between British and American conditions of authorship for women.

Following upon a richly detailed anatomy of the ways in which women in general have found themselves “enclosed in the architecture of an overwhelmingly male-dominated society,” and would-be women writers, in particular, have discovered themselves “constricted and restricted by the Palaces of Art and Houses of Fiction male writers authored” (p. xi), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar observe that, despite all obstacles, “by the end of the eighteenth century … women were not only writing, they were conceiving fictional worlds in which patriarchal images and conventions were...