SOURCE: A review of No Man's Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth-Century, Volume 2: Sexchanges in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 35, No. 4, Winter 1989, pp. 867–68.

In the following excerpt, Boyd calls Sexchanges—volume two of No Man's Land—a better book than the series' first volume, The War of the Words; but holds that Sexchanges is still full of unexamined assumptions.

According to Carolyn Heilbrun, “No Man's Land challenges the very basis of interpretation for a whole period. The study of modernism will never be the same.” I hope she is right. For although I often doubt the success of Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar's challenge, I certainly applaud their attempt. Sexchanges returns to many of the issues presented in The War of the Words (the first volume of the three volume series), notably “the relationship between female dreams of a powerful Herland and male fears...