SOURCE: “Gilbert and Gubar,” in Ms. Magazine, Vol. 14, No. 7, January, 1986, p. 59.

In the following interview by Shapiro, Gubar and Gilbert discuss their work together, and the strategies they used in compiling The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women.

Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar met in an elevator 13 years ago, and by the time it arrived at the fourth floor, an extraordinary partnership had gotten off the ground as well. Gilbert, professor of English at Princeton, and Gubar, professor of English at Indiana University, have collaborated on some of the most invigorating work to date in a field they helped to establish: the study of literature by women. Their first book, The Madwoman in the Attic (1979), examined the means and metaphors by which women writers in the 19th century defied what Emily Dickinson called “the House Without the Door,” the edifice of personal and artistic constraint built up around...