SOURCE: “Pursuing the Amazonian Dream,” in Times Literary Supplement, June 2, 1989, pp. 607–08.

In the following essay, Castle discusses Sexchanges, and reviews Gubar and Gilbert's argument that men's deaths have sparked women's creativity.

In Sexchanges, the latest instalment of No Man's Land, their ambitious multi-volume study of woman writers of the twentieth century, the feminist critics Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar edge, not without anxiety, towards a disturbing yet suggestive theory of the female imagination: that women's creativity is unleashed, if not powerfully excited, by the deaths of men. Describing the tremendous outpouring of women's writing during and after the First World War, they draw a fearsome yet compelling conclusion: that the spectacle of collective male agony and vastation—the abrupt removal of an entire generation of brothers, sons, and lovers—provided a subterranean psychological liberation for women writers. Even while Virginia Woolf, Vera Brittain, Edith Wharton and Katherine Mansfield...