SOURCE: “The Book That Created a Canon: Madwoman in the Attic Turns 20,” in Chronicle of Higher Education, Vol. 46, December 17, 1999, p. A20.

In the following essay marking the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The Madwoman in the Attic, Heller reviews the history of the book's influence on students, teachers, and scholarship.

The story of feminist literary criticism can be told through the fortunes of The Madwoman in the Attic, the classic argument for a women's literary tradition by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar.

Upon its publication in 1979, the big, ambitious volume, subtitled The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, vaulted its authors into the front ranks of their field. They went on to write a three-book sequel on the 20th century, and to edit a sweeping anthology that fashioned a canon of women's writing throughout the ages. Gilbert-and-Gubar, pronounced as if one word, became shorthand for...