SOURCE: A review of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth-Century, Volume 1: The War of the Words, in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 34, No. 4, Winter, 1988, pp. 747–49.

In the following review, Thompson writes that Volume one of No Man's Land lacks intellectual rigor and a “solid theoretical basis.”

The publicity sheet accompanying the review copy of No Man's Land quotes Joyce Carol Oates, Carolyn Heilbrun, Elaine Showalter, and J. Hillis Miller in fulsome praise of Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar's sequel to The Madwoman in the Attic. Oates calls No Man's Land “fast, funny, profound in its theoretical assertions, and deliciously irreverent in its asides.” Heilbrun finds it “exciting and ground-breaking.” Showalter extols the “ambitious range, scholarly passion, and intellectual panache” of the authors. Miller (the token male?) credits Gilbert and Gubar with rewriting “the history of modernism.” These comments have, of course, been taken...