SOURCE: “Modern Romancers,” in Nation, Vol. 247, No. 1, July 2, 1988, pp. 27–8.

In the following review of No Man's Land: The War of the Words, Abraham objects to Gubar and Gilbert's attempts to validate women's literature by placing it in the mainstream of twentieth-century critical categories.

Feminist literary criticism can still be a marginal enterprise in an intellectual universe that also contains William Bennett, Allan Bloom and Gertrude Himmelfarb. But in the almost twenty years since Kate Millett's Sexual Politics helped to inaugurate the field, feminist criticism has also prospered: It now has its own establishment, its own mainstream and margins.

One of the key works in the process of consolidation was Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's 1979 study, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. They synthesized a decade of feminist analyses and applied the result to the recognized nineteenth-century stars—Jane Austen, the...