SOURCE: A review of No Man's Land, Volume 3: Letters from the Front, in Journal of English and Germanic Philology, Vol. 95, No. 2, April, 1996, pp. 269–71.

In the following review of Letters from the Front, the third volume of No Man's Land, Blake commends the monumental scope of the collection.

After reviewing the prior two volumes of No Man's Land the reviewer reaches number three, impressed but tired after close to 1,200 pages of Gilbert and Gubar's critical coverage. Volume 3 is not only monumentally piled on top of Volumes 1 and 2 but on top of the earlier big book The Madwoman in the Attic on nineteenth-century women's writing and The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women, surveying centuries. A huge history and inventory of texts and a huge contribution to feminist literary criticism culminate here with Gilbert and Gubar unfazed and unflagging. The reviewer recovers her wind in a short review. The object...